The Facebook “use your real name” policy may dance to a different tune in Germany. In Germany, the practice has been deemed unacceptable and the social network is being told to allow fake names. The Hamburg Data Protection Authority believes the opposite, that forcing the use of real names violates the privacy of the user.
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It started when a woman complained to the Hamburg watchdog after her Facebook account was blocked for using pseudonym. Facebook also requested a copy of her ID and swapped her username back to her real name. In June, after the Belgian privacy commission took the company to court over user tracking, a Facebook spokesperson said that the privacy commissioner should have worked with them “through a dialogue with us at Facebook Ireland and with our regulator, the Irish data protection commissioner”. This is a question that has popped up a few times now, and even more so after the German regulator who polices Facebook in Germany questioned the real name policy. In addition, he said that “the unauthorised modification of the pseudonym … blatantly violated the right to informational self-determination and constitutes a deliberate infringement of the Data Protection Act”.
“The use of authentic names on Facebook protects people’s privacy and safety by ensuring people know who they’re sharing and connecting with”. She made the changes in order to avoid being contacted for unsolicited business matters. As per its much-debated “real name” policy, Facebook limits individuals to one account each and frequently suspends accounts with suspected pseudonyms until the owner can prove their name or the site changed the name to the real one.
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“Having chosen its policy, Facebook has to enforce it. And because its policy attempts to hammer the reality of names into a constrained model they end up having to make a trade-off in the edge cases”. It also rejected Facebook’s argument that since their European offices were in Ireland, it should be subject to Irish, and not German law.
