Facebook s policy on how people identify themselves on the service continues to attract slings and arrows.
The latest: Germany s data regulator said the social networking service can not block people using fake names, nor can it simply switch a person s account to their real names, Bloomberg reported.
The decision stemmed from the case of a woman who had used a fake name on her private Facebook account to prevent people from contacting her on business matters. Facebook switched her name back to her real one, reports said.
Facebook had argued that it was subject to Ireland s data laws, since the company s European headquarters is there. In 2013, German courts ruled that it was indeed subject to Irish regulation over this issue.
But Johannes Caspar, Hamburg s data regulator, said in an email statement to news services that the company is now subject to German law due to a ruling last year by Europe s top court about Google s search engine results:
Anyone who stands on our pitch also has to play our game. The arbitrary change of the user name blatantly violates privacy rights.
In the U.S., Facebook has been embroiled in controversy over its name policy, with drag queens, transgender activists and domestic violence victims arguing the firm s rules put them in danger. Some took to the San Francisco Pride Parade in June to protest the policy, as Queenie Wong wrote.
The company has said its policy helps keep the social network safe and easy to use.
During a recent interview, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended the policy, reported Wong:
There is some confusion about what our policy actually is. Real name does not mean your legal name. Your real name is whatever you go by and what your friends call you. If your friends all call you by a nickname and you want to use that name on Facebook, you should be able to do that. In this way, we should be able to support everyone using their own real names, including everyone in the transgender community. We are working on better and more ways for people to show us what their real name is so we can both keep this policy which protects so many people in our community while also serving the transgender community.
Above: Facebook s logo. (KAREN BLEIER/AFP/Getty Images).
