Facebook doesn't care about exact name and personal information except to target their Ads effectively. Its no big deal if you don't tell them your real name, they will jump over to the next field. Sooner or later they're going to connect the dots to provide you effective advertisements. It starts with them tracking your location via IP address.
The original opinion piece of this thread notwithstanding, but for the majority of the Internet users, the issue is not if and why the state is tracking you (because people at the large scale are not criminals trying to hide from the state), but the issue is whether we should give up liberties in order for the corporations to serve us effective advertisements. The old fashioned TV box was effective only because it had no competitor. The same is not the case on the Internet.
PS: the only reason Facebook requires real name (or the reason it has built its social network as a walled-garden) so each person stays unique and does not infiltrate or corrupt the data by signing up multiple times via pseudo-identities. Again, look at it from the advertising perspective. Do we think advertising works effectively if one person shows up as multiple? It doesn't.
The original opinion piece of this thread notwithstanding, but for the majority of the Internet users, the issue is not if and why the state is tracking you (because people at the large scale are not criminals trying to hide from the state), but the issue is whether we should give up liberties in order for the corporations to serve us effective advertisements. The old fashioned TV box was effective only because it had no competitor. The same is not the case on the Internet.
PS: the only reason Facebook requires real name (or the reason it has built its social network as a walled-garden) so each person stays unique and does not infiltrate or corrupt the data by signing up multiple times via pseudo-identities. Again, look at it from the advertising perspective. Do we think advertising works effectively if one person shows up as multiple? It doesn't.