Privacy

Just days after Google announced it would no longer police the names chosen by users on its social network, Facebook decided to take up the battle cry, stressing a name policy it’s had on the books but rarely enforced until now. “Facebook is a community where people use their real identities. We require everyone to provide their real names, so you always know who you’re connecting with. This helps keep our community safe,” says the popular social network on their recently-edited name policy page.

On Sunday, malicious software, known as malware, was identified on several sites hosted by Freedom Hosting, which provides consumers the ability to run hidden services, designed to protect their creators from being identified. While these are used for legitimate reasons, many hidden services are used for criminal purposes as well.

The kinky social network Fetlife doesn’t take measures to protect user content and has shown incompetence or negligence in regard to user privacy, all the while prohibiting victims from warning others about predatory behavior in the BDSM community. As users, by enabling FetLife to continue espousing a code of silence and allowing them to spin security issues as “attacks,” we are letting our community become a breeding ground for exploitation.