Banned for keeps on Facebook for odd name

Found on Sydney Morning Herald on Wednesday, 24 September 2008
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Facebook users with even slightly unusual names beware: your account can be suspended by the site's draconian administrators without warning and your personal information held to ransom until you show them a government-issued ID.

This and countless other questionable rules has led some to sound the alarm on the dangers of entrusting one's online identity to Facebook and relying on it so heavily for social interaction.

Despite a long, heated email exchange Facebook refused to tell Keep why she was banned - for "security reasons" - and asked her to verify her identity by sending "a scanned copy of a government-issued ID".

Facebook has also banned people for having too many friends, joining too many groups, posting too many messages on a wall or in a group, "poking" too many people and using duplicate text in multiple messages.

What an anti-social network. As a nice side-effect, forcing users to send in copies of their ID, anonymity vanishes for those who use eg TOR. Also, it will make a very nice basis for selling your data to advertisers; who needs cookie tracking when they know your address?