Clearly, anyone who has been victimized by a violent stalker should be forced to change their lives even more, give up more freedoms and opportunities, and be further marginalized from society.
C'mon, get real. The fact is that participation in social networks - IRL, online, or a hybrid of the two - is now a social norm, and advising those who have been victimized to simply withdraw further from society only serves to further the perpetuation of the stalker's attempt to seek power over the victim.
Since I'd guess that at least 80% of the readers on this thread are male, let me tell 'ya a little story that might help put the issue in context.
---- I'm a UX architect + developer with a specialization in social integration - so the ability to engage on social networks is not negotiable, it's part of my job. I'm also the only person in the world with my name, so I try to be cautious - maximum privacy settings always on any time, never reveal location information associated with my real name, etc., etc.
But thanks to a strategic misrepresentation of a 'real names policy', a violent ex was able to locate me, follow me 4000 miles across the country, moved down the street from my house, started showing up on my train, at my morning cafe, and then at my doorstep. He found my phone number, and when I changed it, he found it again. How did he find me? Yelp breached the terms of their privacy policy that said they wouldn't expose your last name - true, on their site they didn't, but they made it fully searchable via google, allowing even the least competent stalker to easily figure out how to find you when they see what coffee shop you mentioned you went to on a Thursday morning.
After 2 years, I finally was able to get a restraining order that blocks him not only from physical contact and speaking about me in a public forum, but the order also prohibits him from visiting or using any sites I work on, as well as those to which I contribute content under either my birth name OR my long-standing pseudonym.
Even so, I found him accessing my profile on a dating site, and when I alerted that service provider, along with the background information and a request for an address to send copies of the documentation to, they refused to terminate his account. You'd would think that a dating service would want take action to protect its members (and its own reputation) from someone who admitted to attempting to kill someone in court... but even with photographs, police reports and a restraining order in hand, I would have had to take the service provider to court to prove that it was really him.
So although I certainly agree with what most of what danah says, she isn't addressing about the more important issue: the key component that's missing from all of these sites is the ability for a users set filters to restricting access to their content based on a variety of criteria. Content contributors should be able to define more completely who should be able to access their content: including unknown/unauthenticated users, as well as those using any specified pseudonyms, 'real' names, geographic area based on user description and/or reverse geocoding, IP addresses, etc., even if that information is not publicly exposed. And I'd go as far to suggest that it would be the right thing to do to alert the user if and when any of their filters are triggered, or if there are any questionable usage patterns from unknown users so that the users have the information they need in order to take action to protect themselves.
Personally, I think that users should be able to select any display name, but the only real solution is to mandate real names on the backend, with verified identity via bank information, credit card numbers, or other info of that sort by an independent party, and that misrepresenting one's identity to gain access to information on any social network should be explicitly made an arrestable offence - it should be a felony, backed by significant jail time.
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Clearly, anyone who has been victimized by a violent stalker should be forced to change their lives even more, give up more freedoms and opportunities, and be further marginalized from society.
C'mon, get real. The fact is that participation in social networks - IRL, online, or a hybrid of the two - is now a social norm, and advising those who have been victimized to simply withdraw further from society only serves to further the perpetuation of the stalker's attempt to seek power over the victim.
Since I'd guess that at least 80% of the readers on this thread are male, let me tell 'ya a little story that might help put the issue in context.
----
I'm a UX architect + developer with a specialization in social integration - so the ability to engage on social networks is not negotiable, it's part of my job. I'm also the only person in the world with my name, so I try to be cautious - maximum privacy settings always on any time, never reveal location information associated with my real name, etc., etc.
But thanks to a strategic misrepresentation of a 'real names policy', a violent ex was able to locate me, follow me 4000 miles across the country, moved down the street from my house, started showing up on my train, at my morning cafe, and then at my doorstep. He found my phone number, and when I changed it, he found it again. How did he find me? Yelp breached the terms of their privacy policy that said they wouldn't expose your last name - true, on their site they didn't, but they made it fully searchable via google, allowing even the least competent stalker to easily figure out how to find you when they see what coffee shop you mentioned you went to on a Thursday morning.
After 2 years, I finally was able to get a restraining order that blocks him not only from physical contact and speaking about me in a public forum, but the order also prohibits him from visiting or using any sites I work on, as well as those to which I contribute content under either my birth name OR my long-standing pseudonym.
Even so, I found him accessing my profile on a dating site, and when I alerted that service provider, along with the background information and a request for an address to send copies of the documentation to, they refused to terminate his account. You'd would think that a dating service would want take action to protect its members (and its own reputation) from someone who admitted to attempting to kill someone in court... but even with photographs, police reports and a restraining order in hand, I would have had to take the service provider to court to prove that it was really him.
So although I certainly agree with what most of what danah says, she isn't addressing about the more important issue: the key component that's missing from all of these sites is the ability for a users set filters to restricting access to their content based on a variety of criteria. Content contributors should be able to define more completely who should be able to access their content: including unknown/unauthenticated users, as well as those using any specified pseudonyms, 'real' names, geographic area based on user description and/or reverse geocoding, IP addresses, etc., even if that information is not publicly exposed. And I'd go as far to suggest that it would be the right thing to do to alert the user if and when any of their filters are triggered, or if there are any questionable usage patterns from unknown users so that the users have the information they need in order to take action to protect themselves.
Personally, I think that users should be able to select any display name, but the only real solution is to mandate real names on the backend, with verified identity via bank information, credit card numbers, or other info of that sort by an independent party, and that misrepresenting one's identity to gain access to information on any social network should be explicitly made an arrestable offence - it should be a felony, backed by significant jail time.
No, this problem mustn't