You know you won't die if you get facebook and you can be as anon as you like. There are a lot of fun groups on facebook connected to any interest you have. Why not create a test account with a new email address and take a look around?
^ I've never needed one. I have absolutely no use for Facebook, and I don't trust its privacy protections (or lack thereof). @Fruitcake - Facebook requires the use of real names, and tends to come down hard on users who try to register names it believes are fake. It also requires users to submit proof of their identity by sending in assorted ID documents.
Oh ffs have had this conversation so many times. You are completely incorrect but I guess by now it's deliberate.
Yeah. I always wondered about folks with...nifty first and last names as if they were written for fantasy/supernatural/fairy novels.
Facebook is serious business, folks. I'll prove it by posting from my cat's account, which obviously required multiple forms of ID.
But you trust Twitter? Hmm, I wonder what documents my friend's cat provided for his account. (Ha! Just noticed your post, Scout101. )
Yes, I do. As for Facebook? Perhaps I'm not exactly an expert at getting around its user restrictions. Fine, I admit that. But isn't that just more evidence that I shouldn't be using Facebook in the first place? Besides, as long as we're talking about using the Internet to connect with other people...and finding interests I might have in common with them...this board is an excellent substitute. I have a lot of very good friends I've found right here, and talking with them - and discovering what we have in common - is more than enough to occupy my free time. And like I said, I simply don't know what I would use Facebook for. Twitter is very useful to me (particularly for getting in touch with a company's customer service department), but I honestly don't know what I would ever do with a Facebook account.
It takes about 2 minutes to make a FB account under any name you like, using any email you have. The restrictions are there so they can use them against spammers and people abusing the system, they don't come into play for people making an account. You do not have to submit ID. You have certainly read this before in other discussions, maybe you just like declaring you don't have and will never have facebook? Some people seem to enjoy this like it's a merit badge. If you use your real name on twitter and are signed up with an email you have ever used for anything else you already have no privacy, certainly less than I do with facebook.
I was going to say, I work in marketing and generally just the slightest bit of identifying data lets me know who you are. An email address will probably give me all of your social profiles (or at least the major ones like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), some behavioral, demographic and affinity information gathered by Google, and though I don't currently work in ecomm but rather healthcare IT, if I did, that email address would give me a hefty chunk of RFM data, too. Of course, Edward Snowden already showed that the CIA already knows all this about us. Edit: I mean, this is one of the reasons everyone is going bugnuts crazy about the advances made in deep learning, predictive analytics and cognitive computing by programs like Watson -- we're gathering so much data about users and we're just now beginning to have technology that can do something with it. (The other reason people are going nuts is that robotics already automated a ton of jobs, and soon cognitive computing is going to eliminate another shit-ton -- and I mean SHIT-TON -- of jobs by making them completely redundant, but that's a whole other discussion.)
Hey, I'm not trying to convince you to join fb, just pointing out that one of your reasons is based on a misunderstanding of how it actually works.
^ Okay. So we're good. If I am operating under false assumptions, I welcome the opportunity to be corrected. I have no problem with that!
You could make an account you don't use that is empty and it would allow you to click on interesting links people frequently post in threads here as part of discussions. But of course that would mean you would have to give up declaring your facebook free status and invoking privacy boogie men when facebook comes up.
Well, then, correcting false assumption #1: You don't need to provide a photo ID in order to create a Facebook account.
Plenty of sites say they require real names. The news site I comment on every day put that rule in earlier this year... and then came clean that they'll settle for names that "look real." I'd love to know just who does the vetting for this. I'm not using my real name there (I'd be an idiot to do that, since my political opinions aren't popular in this region of the country), but how can the idiots who moderate that site not realize that someone using the name "Jethro Bodine" is using a fake name? As for Facebook, you don't need any ID. It's like the email sites that ask for your phone number - you really don't have to give it.
Facebook does sometimes enforce the name rule, though. I have a friend whose account was locked because she was using a fake name. She had to show them ID to get let back in. She used a fake one.