Like much of the UK, there are local elections where I live next month. After coming home from a week of Three Rings volunteering I found my poll card on the doormat. Can you spot the bleeding-obvious mistake?
Also interesting was that this year the poll card came in a tamper-evidence tear-to-open envelope rather than just being a piece of card. Does the government now think that postal
workers are routinely stealing voter identities? Cohabitees?
This’ll be the first election for which I’ve needed to bring photographic ID to the polling station. That shouldn’t be a problem: I have a passport and driving license and whatnot.
But just to be absolutely certain, I had the local council – the same people who issued me the polling card! – supply me with a voter authority certificate:
Note that this document, also issued by West Oxfordshire District Council, spells my name correctly.
So now I’m in a pickle. West Oxfordshire District Council are asking me to produce photo ID in the wrong name when I turn up at a polling station next month. It doesn’t even
match the name on the photo ID that they themselves issued me.
This would be less-infuriating were it not for the fact that they had my name wrong in the same way on an electoral roll form they sent me in August 20221.
When I contacted them to have them fix it, they promised that the underlying problem was solved2
so this very thing wouldn’t happen.
And yet here we are.
Hopefully they’ll be able to fix their records promptly or else I guess I’ll have to apply for a proxy vote, to allow the ballot of my imaginary friend “Dan Que” to be cast by me, Dan
Q, instead.
And if that isn’t the most bizarre form of election fraud you’ve ever heard of, I don’t know what is.
Update: True to their word, the council had managed to
correct their records by the time I reached the polling station this morning. It’s still a little annoying that they somehow mucked it up in the first place, but I appreciate the
efficiency with which they corrected their mistake.
Footnotes
1 They’d had my name right before August 2022, including on previous poll cards;
I can only assume that some human operator “corrected” it to the wrong thing at some point.
2 They didn’t fix the problem immediately in August 2022. Initially, they
demanded that I produce proof of my change of name from “Dan Que” (which has, of course, never been my name!) to “Dan Q”, and only later backed down and admitted that they’d
made a mistake and would correct the PII they were holding about me.
Write about your first name: its meaning, significance, etymology, etc.
First eighteen years
When I was born, my parents named me Daniel, possibly as a result of Elton John’s
influence.1 I wasn’t given a middle name, and – ignoring nicknames, some of
which are too crude to republish – I went exclusively by Daniel for my entire childhood.
“Oh Lord! Please deliver me from this fate| For I am truly Not A Cat Person!”
The name comes from a Aramaic and Hebrew roots – din (judge) and el (god) – meaning “judged by god”, but I can’t imagine my parents knew or cared. They’ll
probably have been aware of its Biblical significance, where Daniel2
interprets dreams for the king, gets promoted a whole lot, but then because he prefers worshipping his god to worshipping his king they throw him to the lions3 before getting rescued by an angel and going on to have a successful career
predicting the end times (long before John of Patmos made it cool).
Next eight years
When I went to university in 1999 I started volunteering with Aberystwyth
Nightline.4 They already had a Daniel, so for convenience I
introduced myself as Dan. By the time I was going by Dan there I figured I might as well be Dan in my halls of residence and my course, too, so Dan I became.
People occasionally called me Dan prior to my going to university, but it was there that it became cemented as being my “actual name”. “Other” Daniel graduated and moved away from
Aberystwyth, but I’d settled pretty well on Dan. I updated my name in my email From: line to reflect the change in circa 2003, which felt plenty official enough, and I
didn’t do well at maintaining many of my pre-university friendships sufficiently that I’d hear “Daniel” from anybody at all.
“Shh, don’t tell anybody my legal name is ‘Dan’,” Dan of May 2003 might have said.
Last seventeen years
Eventually, my then-partner Claire and I got to that point where we were talking about what we wanted out of it in the long term. We agreed that
while marriage wasn’t a good representation of our relationship, but we quite liked the idea of having the same family name someday. And so we started, on-and-off, talking about what
that surname could be. Neither of us wanted to take the other’s and double-barrelling was definitely out: we decided we’d far rather come up with a completely original name that was
just ours.
It took us years, because we were pretty indecisive, but we eventually cut out choices down by committing to a single-character surname! When we chose ‘Q’ as
our new surname and wrote out some deeds poll I took the opportunity to change my legally-recognised first name to just Dan, at the same time. That was what
everybody5
called me by now, anyway.
1 My mother tells me that they also considered Luke, which I suppose
might have been George Lucas’ doing.
2 I mean the one from the Book of Daniel, of course, not one of the other three Daniels
mentioned in the Bible. It turns out that in ancient times, as now, Daniel was a common-as-muck kinda name.
3 It turns out than in ancient times, as now, being thrown to the lions was considered
fatal.
4 There’s a whole other story about why I did this, and the path it set me on,
but that’s for another day I think.
5 Not everybody consistently calls me Dan. My mother routinely still calls me Daniel, but
given that she gave birth to me she can get away with calling me anything the hell she wants.
The programmers at British Gas are among the many who don’t believe that a surname can be only a single character, and their customer service agents
have clearly worked around their validations (or just left a note for themselves in the problematic field!)… leading to hilarious postal mail1:
Update
This is getting a lot of attention, so I just wanted to add:
I’ve already seen Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names, thanks. I linked it above, but you probably didn’t see the link if you
found me via all the Mastodon boosts this post is getting.
Following their security incident last month, many users of LastPass are in the process of cycling
their security credentials for many of their accounts1.
I don’t use LastPass2,
but I’ve had ocassion to cycle credentials before, so I appreciate the pain that people are going through.
It’s not just passwords, though: it may well be your “security question” answers you need to rotate too. Your passwords quickly become worthless if an attacker can guess the answers to
your “security questions” at services that use them. If you’re using a password safe anyway, you should either:
Answer security questions with long strings of random garbage3,
or
Ensure that you use different answers for every service you use, as you would with passwords.4
In the latter case, you’re probably storing your security answers in a password safe5.
If the password safe they’re stored in is compromised, you need to change the answers to those security questions in order to secure the account.
This leads to the unusual situation where you can need to call up your bank and say: “Hi, I’d like to change my mother’s maiden name.” (Or, I suppose, father’s middle
name, first pet’s name, place of birth, or whatever.) Banks in particular are prone to disallowing you from changing your security answers over the Internet, but all kinds of other
businesses can also make this process hard… presumably because a well-meaning software engineer couldn’t conceive of any reason that a user might want to.
I sometimes use a pronouncable password generator to produce fake names for security question answers. And I’ll tell you what: I get some bemused reactions when I say things like “I’d
like to change my mother’s maiden name from Tuyiborhooniplashon to Mewgofartablejuki.”
1 If you use LastPass, you should absolutely plan to do this. IMHO, LastPass’s reassurances about the difficulty in cracking the encryption on the leaked data is a gross exaggeration. I’m not saying you need to
panic – so long as your master password is reasonably-long and globally-unique – but perhaps cycle all your credentials during 2023. Oh, and don’t rely on your second factor:
it doesn’t help with this particular incident.
2 I used to use LastPass, until around 2016, and I still think it’s a good choice for many
people, but nowadays I carry an encrypted KeePassXC password safe on a pendrive (with an automated backup onto an encrypted partition on our
household NAS). This gives me some security and personalisation benefits, at the expense of only a little convenience.
3 If you’re confident that you could never lose your password (or rather: that you could
never lose your password without also losing the security question answers because you would store them in the same place!), there’s no value in security questions, and the best thing
you can do might be to render them unusable.
4 If you’re dealing with a service that uses the security questions in a misguided effort
to treat them as a second factor, or that uses them for authentication when talking to them on the telephone, you’ll need to have usable answers to the questions for when they come
up.
5 You can, of course, use a different password safe for your randomly-generatred
security question answers than you would for the password itself; perhaps a more-secure-but-less-convenient one; e.g. an encrypted pendrive kept in your fire safe?
It’s that time of year again when I comparison-shop for car insurance, and every time I come across a new set of reasons to hate the developers at Confused.com. How do you confuse me?
Let me count the ways.
No means yes
I was planning to enumerate my concerns to them directly, via their contact form, but when I went to do so I spotted this bit of
genius, which clinched it and made me write a blog post instead:
Clicking the word “Yes” means “Yes”. Clicking the word “No” means “Yes” as well.
Turns out that there’s a bit of the old sloppy-paste going on there:
Honestly, I’m used to my unusual name causing trouble by now and I know how to work around it in the way that breaks the fewest systems (I can even usually
get airline tickets without too much difficulty nowadays). But these kinds of (arbitrary) restrictions must frustrate folks like Janice Keihanaikukauakahihulihe’ekahaunaele.
I guess their developers didn’t realise that this blog post was parody?
Also, that’s not my title!
This one, though, pisses me off:
As everybody knows, there are only six titles, and two of them are “Dr”.
This is a perfect example of why your forms should ask for what you actually want to know, not for what you think people want to tell you. Just ask!
If you want to know my gender, ask for my gender! (I’m a man, by the way.)
I don’t understand why you want to know – after all, it’s been illegal since 2012 to risk-assess/price car insurance differently on the grounds of gender – but maybe you’ve
got a valid reason. Which hopefully you’ll tell me in a tooltip. Like you’re using it as a (terrible checksum) when you check my driving license details, that’s fine!
If you want to know my title, ask for my title! (I prefer not to use one, but if you must use one I’d prefer Mx.)
This ought to be an optional field, of course, and ideally you want a free text input or else you’ll always have missed somebody (Lord, Reverend, Prince, Wing Commander…).
It’s in your interests because I’m totally going to pick at random otherwise. Today I’m a Ms.
Consistency? Never heard of it.
It’s not a big thing, but if you come up with a user interface paradigm like “clicking More… shows more buttons”, you ought to stick to it.
Maybe their internal style guide says “a More… button with three additional options should use buttons, but four additional options should be a drop-down”. But it seems more-likely
that they just don’t have one.
Again, I’m not sure exactly what all of this data is used for, nor why there’s a need to differentiate between married couples and civil partnerships, but let’s just assume this is all
necessary and legitimate and just ask ourselves: why are we using drop-downs now for “More…”? We were using buttons just a second ago!
This was just crying out for a type-in field. But I guess the same developer who did the “Title” question did this one too, and wanted to show off the fancy “more buttons” control
they’d written. (Imaginary style guide be damned!)
What’s my occupation again?
There’s so much to unpack in the “occupation” part of the form that I’m not even sure where to begin. Let’s just pick out a few things:
I never answered a question this hard even in the exams I did when I was a student. Why do we care where students live… except if they’re postgrads? If I’m a mature student
studying a postgraduate course in medicine while living at home with my parents… which of the five possible options should I pick? And, again: what difference could it conceivably
make?
The student thing is just the beginning, though. You can declare up to two jobs, but if the first one is “house person/parent” you can’t have a second one. If you’re self-employed, that
has to be your first job even though the guidance says that the one you spend most time on must be the first one (this kind of thing infuriated me when I used to spend 60% of
my work time employed, 20% self-employed, and 20% studying).
I’m not saying it’s easy to make a form like this. I know from experience that it’s not. I am saying that Confused.com make it look a lot harder than it is.
Well that clears everything up. Also, I think you mean “houseperson”, unless you’re referring to somebody who is half-house/half-person, like some kind of architectural werewolf.
What do you mean, you live with your partner?
At a glance, this sounds like a “poly world problem”, but hear me out:
What you’re seeing here is a reference-identity error. I can’t possibly be living together with somebody as a couple if their marital status isn’t “Living With Partner”.
I put Ruth‘s martial status as married, because she’s married to JTA. But then when it asked how she was related to me, it wouldn’t accept
“Living together (couple)”.
If I put Ruth as the primary policyholder (proposer) though, I don’t even get the option of “living together (couple)” to describe her relationship with me. ‘Cos it’s physically
impossible to have a partner and be married, right?
Even if you don’t think it’s odd that they hide “living with partner” button as an option to describe a married person’s relationship to somebody other than their spouse… you’ve still
got to agree that it’s a little bit odd that they don’t hide the “spouse” button. In other words, this user interface is more-okay with you having multiple spouses than it is
with you having a spouse and an unmarried partner!
And of course this isn’t just about polyamorous folks: there are perfectly “normal” reasons that a person might end up confused by this interface, too. For example a separated (but not
yet divorced) couple, one of whom has a new partner (it’s not even inconceivable that such a pair might share custody of a car). Also interesting is the fact that the form doesn’t
care about the gender of your spouse (it doesn’t ask for “husband” or “wife”) but does care about the gender of your parent, child, or sibling. What gives?
Half a dozen easy fixes. Go for it, Confused.com.
Given that their entire marketing plan for most of the last two decades has been that they reduce customer confusion, Confused.com’s user interface leaves a lot to be
desired. As I’ve mentioned before – and speaking as a web developer that’s been in the game for longer than their company has – it’s not necessarily easy to get this kind of
thing right. But you can improve a form like this, a little at a time. And every little win counts for something: a more-satisfied returning customer, perhaps, or a new word-of-mouth
recommendation.
Or you can just let it languish and continue to have the kind of form that people mock on the public Internet.
It’ll be a year until I expect to comparison-shop for car insurance again: let’s see how they get on, shall we?
Update (21 January 2021): Confused.com Respond!
I didn’t expect to receive any response to this post: most organisations don’t when I call-out the problems with their websites (not least
because I’m more than a little bit sarcastic about it!). I never heard back from the Digital Climate Strike folks, for example,
when I pointed out that their website was a great example of exactly the kind of problem they were protesting. But Confused.com
passed on my thoughts to Product Manager Gareth who took a look at them and gave me a £20 Amazon gift card by way of thanks. Nice one, Confused.com!
For most of the last decade, one of my side projects has been FreeDeedPoll.org.uk, a website that helps British adults to change their name
for free and without a solicitor. Here’s a little known fact: as a British citizen, you have the right to be known by virtually any name you like, and for most people the
simplest way to change it is to write out a deed poll: basically a one-person contract on which you promise that you’re serious about adopting your new name and you’re not committing
fraud or anything.
This web design looked dated when I made it and hasn’t gotten any younger, but the content remains valid as ever.
Over that time, I’ve helped thousands of people to change their names. I don’t know exactly how many because I don’t keep any logs, but I’ve always gotten plenty of email from people
about the project. Contact spiked in 2013 after the Guardian ran an article about it, but I still correspond with two or three people in a typical week.
These people have lots of questions that come up time and time again, and if I had more free time I’d maintain an FAQ
of them or something. In any case, a common one is people asking for advice when their high street bank, almost invariably either Nationwide or Santander, disputes the legitimacy of a
“home made” deed poll and refuses to accept it.
You’d think that Santander of all people would appreciate how important it is to have your legitimate change of name respected. Hang on… haven’t I joked about their rebranding before?
When such people contact me, I advise them of a number of solutions and workarounds. Going to a different branch can work (training at these high street banks is internally
inconsistent, I guess?). Getting your government-issued identity documents sorted and then threatening to move your account elsewhere can sometimes work. For applicants willing to spend
a little money, paying a solicitor a couple of quid to be one of your witnesses can work. I often don’t hear back from people who email me about these banks: maybe they find
success by one of these routes, or maybe they give up and go down one an unnecessarily-expensive avenue.
But one thing I always put on the table is the possibility of fighting. I provide a playbook of strategies to try to demonstrate to their troublemaking bank that the bank is in the
wrong, along with all of the appropriate legal citations. Recent years put a new tool in the box: the GDPR/DPA2018, which contains clauses prohibiting companies from knowingly
retaining incorrect personal data about an individual. I’ve been itching for a chance to use these new weapons… and over this last month, I finally had the opportunity.
Print this. Sign here. That’s pretty-much all there is to it.
I was recently contacted by a student (who, as you might expect, has more free time than they do spare money!) who was having trouble with Santander refusing to accept their deed poll.
They were willing to go all-out to prove their bank wrong. So I gave them the toolbox and they worked through it and… Santander caved!
Not only have Santander accepted that they were wrong in the case of this student, but they’ve also committed to retraining their staff. Oh, and they’ve paid compensation to
the student who emailed me.
Even from my position on the sidelines, I couldn’t help but cheer at this news, and not just because I’ll hopefully have fewer queries to deal with.
When Claire and I changed our surnames to the letter Q, six and a quarter years ago, I was pretty sure that we were the only “Q”s in the world. Ah Q‘s name is a transliteration into the Latin alphabet; Stacey Q is a stage name that she doesn’t use outside of her work (she uses Swain in
general); Suzi Q‘s “Q” is short for Quatro (perhaps popularised because of the
similarly-named song, which came out when she was aged 7; Maggie Q‘s “Q” is short for Quigley (she finds that her full name is almost impossible for her fans in East
Asia to pronounce); and both Q and Q are fictional. We were reasonably sure that we were the only two people in the world
with our surname, and that was fine by us.
Fictional, as much as we love them.
After Claire and I split up, in 2009, we both kept our new names. In my case, the
name felt like it was “mine”, and represented me better than my birth name anyway. Plus, I’d really gotten to enjoy having a full name that’s only four letters long: when my poly-tribe-mates Ruth and JTA (each of whom have almost 30 letters in their full names!) were filling out mortgage application forms recently, I was able to
get through the pages I had to fill significantly faster than either of them. There are perks to a short name.
Also fictional. But we’re less-upset about that.
I can’t say why Claire kept her new name, but I’m guessing that some of our reasons overlap. I’m also guessing that laziness played a part in her decision: it took her many months to
finally get around to telling everybody she’d changed her name the first time around! And while I’ve tried to make it possible to change your name easily when I launchedfreedeedpoll.org.uk, there’s still at least a little letter-writing involved.
Now, though, it looks like I may soon become the only Q in the world:
Personally, I thought that after she passed her PhD she’d
have even more reason to be called “Q”. I mean: “Dr. Q”: how cool is that? It sounds like a Bond villain or something. But on the other hand: if she wants to downgrade to
an everyday name like “Carter” then, well, I guess that’s up to her. I shan’t blame them for not opting to hyphenate, though: “Carter-Q” sounds like a brand of ear bud.
It’s not like there was ever anybody famous called “Carter”. Except for this guy, I suppose. But he was more of a “brave politician in the face of international crises” character than
a “Bond villain” character. Not fictional.
Seriously, though: good for them. If those crazy kids feel that marriage is for them, then I wish them the best of luck. And let’s face it, we’re approaching a bit of a lull in this run
of all-of-our-friends-getting-married, so it’ll be nice to have an excuse for yet another wedding and a fabulous party (I’m jumping to conclusions and assuming that they’re going to
invite me, especially after this blog post!).
Aww. It’s a sweet photo, but somebody should probably buy them a tripod as a wedding present: it’s hard to keep the horizon level in an arms-length selfie.
In other name-related news, look out for me in the Money section of tomorrow’s Guardian, where I’ll be talking about deeds
poll, as part of their series of articles on scammy websites. I always knew that it was only a matter of time before my photo appeared in a national newspaper: I guess I should just be
thankful that it’s for something I’ve done right, rather than for something I’ve done wrong!
On this day in 2011 I launched
FreeDeedPoll.org.uk, a site that tries to make it as easy as possible for British citizens to change their names (and have those new names
accepted as being legally-recognised).
Generate free UK deeds of name change at freedeedpoll.org.uk.
The thing that people often don’t realise is that, as a British citizen, you have the right to be known by pretty-much any name you like. You don’t need a solicitor to change your name. You don’t even need any
money. You can just start using it. A deed poll, which you can make all by yourself for free, is just a piece of paper on which you write a promise that you
consider your “new” name to be your primary moniker, and not your “old” one.
Over the last year, almost 3,000 deed polls have been generated using the site, including ones for my partner Ruth (who opted to keep her maiden name as a middle name after she got married) and my friend Jen (who now has among the coolest – and most hippyish – collection of names I’ve ever seen). As to how many of the other thousands of deed polls
have actually been used, I simply don’t know: as a commitment to privacy, no logs are kept of the names people enter onto the form, so for all I know there are 2,000 all the same and
998 “blank” submissions.
Looking Forward
I’ve become a minor Internet guru on the topic of name changes, it turns out. The other week, a transgendered stranger contacted me via the “chat to Dan” link, to ask about the legal
aspects of their (slightly more-complex than most) case for changing their name. And because I’m a fan of helping people, I did a little research with them in order to find the answers.
I felt the need to keep stressing that IANAL, but I’m
pretty sure I managed to help, anyway.
And over the New Year, when there were a few days of downtime for the site (I was part of an exodus of domains from my SOPA-supporing previous registrar, and they made the process
difficult), I received messages from people asking when it would be back up again, so it’s obviously getting some use.
Most recently, a few days ago, a stranger emailed me asking for advice on the legal issues in changing the names of his children. After doing the necessary research, I’m now thinking of
expanding the site to make this easier, too.
A (sample) deed poll document generated by freedeedpoll.org.uk.
A strange feeling for me has been that this project is, and has been for the last year, “finished”. I’m not very good at finishing technical projects: one of the biggest and most
important things that I’ve worked on – Three Rings – is
now
in its tenth year and shows no sign of being “finished”. So it feels odd to have developed a website that’s complete, done and dusted, and probably won’t require more than a modicum
of maintenance over the coming decades to keep it running.
It’s good, though, that I’ve been able to help people with something about which far too many are underinformed. It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, and I like it.
To mark the ocassion, I’ve updated the open-source version of the
tool so that it works “out of the box”: it now includes all of the (free) fonts you need to get started, and can be used without setting up reCAPTCHA if you like. For more information about the history of the project, see my project page about it.
This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on
years gone by.
tl;dr: [skip to the end] I’m closing my Facebook account. I’ve got some suggestions at the
bottom of this post about how you might like to keep in touch with me in future, if you previously liked to do so via Facebook.
The Backstory
A little over three weeks ago, I was banned from Facebook for having a fake name.
This surprised me, because I was using my real name – it’s an unusual name, but it’s mine.
I was interested to discover that Claire, who shares my name, hadn’t been similarly banned, so it seems that this
wasn’t part of some “sweep” for people with one-letter names, but instead was probably the result of somebody (some stranger, I’d like to hope) clicking the “Report this as a fake name”
link on my profile.
Perhaps somebody clicked their way through to this page, and claimed that I was not a "real person".
There are many, many things about this that are alarming, but the biggest is the “block first; ask questions later” attitude. I wasn’t once emailed to warn me that I would be
banned. Hell: I wasn’t even emailed to tell me that I had been banned. It took until I tried to log in before I found out at all.
The Problem
I don’t make much use of Facebook, really. I cross-post my blog posts there, and I keep Pidgin signed in to Facebook
Chat in case anybody’s looking for me. Oh, and I stalk people from my past, but that’s just about the only thing I do on it that everybody does on it. I don’t really
wallpost, I avoid internal messages (replying to them, where possible, by email), and I certainly don’t play fucking FarmVille.
Once, one of my Facebook friends invited me to FarmVille. They're not my Facebook friend any more.
So what’s the problem? It’s not like I’d be missing anything if I barely use it anyway? The problem is that my account was still there, it’s just that I didn’t have access to
it.
That meant that people still invited me to things and sent me messages. My friends are smart enough to know that I won’t see anything they write on their wall, but they assume
that if they update the information of a party they’ve Facebook-invited me to that I’ll get it. For example, I was recently at a fabulous party at Gareth and Penny‘s which they organised
mostly via Facebook. They’d be forgiven for assuming that when they sent a message to “the guests” – a list that included me – that I would get that message: but no – it fell silently
away into Facebook’s black hole.
The Farce(book?)
Following this discovery, here’s how I spent the next three weeks:
Facebook gave me a form to fill in when I tried to log in, explaining their “Real Names” policy and asking me to fill in my real name and explain “what I use Facebook for”
(“Ignoring friends and stalking exes, same as everybody else,” I explained, “Why; what do YOU use Facebook for?”).
It then asked me to scan and upload some government-issued photographic ID, which I did. It still wouldn’t let me log in, but it promised that somebody would look at my ID soon (and
then destroy their copy) and re-enable my account.
I periodically tried to log in over the next few days, without success: I was to wait, I was told.
After about a week, I received an email from “Rachel” at Facebook, who explained the “Real Names” policy and asked me to provide my REAL name, and a scan of some photographic ID. I
replied to explain that I’d already done this once, but complied with her request anyway.
Another few days passed, and I still hadn’t heard anything, so I filled in the Contact Forms in the Help section of Facebook, asking to have my request processed by an actual human
being. I provided by ID yet again.
Another few days later, I received an email from “Aoife” at Facebook. It was pretty-much exactly the same as the earlier email from Rachel. I replied to explain that we’d
been through this already. I supplied another pile of photo ID, and a few sarcastic comments.
A real person, with a real name, holding two examples of his real government-issued photographic ID. I wonder how long it would take a smart person to look at a scan of that ID and
say, "Yeah, this person's real enough to be allowed to post pictures of cats on his wall, again."
Another couple of days passed, so I dug up the postal addresses of Facebook’s HQ, and Mark Zuckerberg‘s new Palo Alto house (he’s tried to keep it secret, but the Internet is pretty good at this kind of
detective work), and sent each of them a letter explaining my predicament.
Yet more days passed, and we reached the third week of my ban. I replied to Rachel and Aoife, asking how long this was likely to take.
Finally, a little over three weeks after the ban was first put in place, it was lifted. I received an email from Aoife:
Hi Dan,
Thanks for verifying your identity. Note that we permanently deleted your attached ID from our servers.
After investigating this further, it looks like we suspended your account by mistake. I’m so sorry for the inconvenience. You should now be able to log in. If you have any issues
getting back into your account, please let me know.
Thanks,
Aoife
User Operations
Facebook
The Resolution
So now, I’m back on Facebook, and I’ve learned something: having a Facebook account that you can’t log in to is worse than not having a Facebook account at all. If
I didn’t have one at all, at least people would know that they couldn’t contact me that way. In my situation, Facebook were effectively lying to my friends: telling them “Yeah, sure:
we’ll pass on your message to Dan!” and then not doing so. It’s a little bit like digital identity theft, and it’s at least a little alarming.
I’ve learned something else, too: Facebook can’t be trusted to handle this kind of situation properly. Anybody could end up in my situation. Those of you with unusual
(real) names, or unusual-looking pseudonyms, or who use fake names on Facebook (and I know that there are at least a dozen of you on my friends list)… or just those of you whose name
looks a little bit off to a Facebook employee… you’re all at risk of this kind of lockout.
Me? I was a little pissed off, but it wasn’t the end of the world. But I know people who use Facebook’s “single sign-on” authentication systems to log in to other services. I know
people who do some or all of their business through Facebook. Increasingly, I’ve seen people store their telephone or email address books primarily on Facebook. What do you do when you
lose access to this and can’t get it back? When there’s nowhere to appeal?
And that’s how I came to my third lesson: I can’t rely on Facebook not to make this kind of fuck-up again. No explanation was given as to how their “mistake” was
made, so I can’t trust that whatever human or automated system was at fault won’t just do the same damn dumb thing tomorrow to me or to somebody I know. And personally, I don’t
like Facebook to seize control of my account and to pretend to be me. I come full circle to my first realisation – that it would be better not to have a Facebook account
at all than to have one that I can’t access – and realise that because that’s liable to happen again at any time, that I shouldn’t have a Facebook account.
The Conclusion
So, I’m ditching Facebook.
Goodbye, Facebook.
None of this pansy “deactivation” shit, either – do you know what that actually does, by the way? It just hides your wall and stops new people from friending you: it still keeps all of
your information, because it’s basically a scam to try to keep your data while making you think you’ve left. No, I’m talking about the real “permanent deletion” deal.
I’m going to hang around for a few days to make sure I’ve harvested everybody’s email addresses and pushing this post to my wall and whatnot, and then I’m gone.
If you’re among those folks who aren’t sure how to function outside of Facebook, but still want to keep in touch with me, here’s what you need to know:
I like email! Remember email? I’ve always preferred it to Facebook messages anyway – that’s why I always reply to you by email, where possible. My email address
is pretty obvious – it’s my first name @ this domain name – but if that’s too hard for you, just fill in this form to get in touch
with me. If you’re up for some security while you’re at it, why not encrypt your email to me.
I like instant messaging! I may not be on Facebook Messenger any more, but we can still chat! The best way to get me is on Google Talk, but there are plenty of
other options too. Here’s how you do it. Or if you’re really lazy, just check at
the top of my blog for the little green light and click “Chat to Dan”.
I like blogging! Want to know what’s going on in my life? I never updated my “wall” anyway except to link to blog posts – you might as well just come look at my
blog! Too much like work? Follow my RSS feed and get updated when I post to my blog, or keep an eye on my Twitter, which usually gets links to my new blog posts almost as soon as they go up.
I like sharing!I’m not on Google Reader any more, but when I find fun
things on the Internet that I enjoyed reading, I put them in this RSS feed.
Subscribe and see what I’ve been looking at online, or just look at “Dan is Reading…” in the right-hand column of my blog.
And I’m not opposed to social networking! I’ve just reached the end of my patience with Facebook, that’s all. Look me up on Google+ and I’ll see you over there (They also have a “Real Names” policy, which is still a bit of a problem, but
I’m sending them a pre-emptive “Don’t ban me, bro!” email now)!
Ironically, the only Facebook accounts I’ll have now are the once which do have fake names. Funny how they’re the ones that never seem to get banned.
I have an unusual name: I’m pretty sure I’m the only person with my name in the world. It’s not the quirkiest name in the world – I have two names, the first one is pretty common, the
second one is unusual but isn’t a swearword or “Elephanthead” or something, it’s all in the Latin alphabet, etc. – but it is a little strange.
Three weeks ago, Facebook blocked me from logging in. I wouldn’t have noticed except that my phone failed to log in to Facebook Chat, and told me that I needed to log in on
facebook.com first. When I logged in, I was shown a form that stated that “Facebook is a community where people use their real names,” and that I had to “Supply my real name, as it
appears on government-issued ID.” So I did.
Then it asked me to upload a photo of said ID, so I did.
After a week, Facebook emailed me to remind me of their real names policy and asked me to tell them my real name and to send them proof, as before. So I did so. This time I sent not
only my driving license but also my passport.
Another week goes by, and they email me again with exactly the same text. I email back, asking if they actually read my last email at all. This time I provided photos of my
passport, driving license, and carefully-censored pictures of my bank card, work ID, college ID, medical insurance card, etc.
Another few days go by, and they send me the exact same email again, asking for the same information yet again. I’ve tried to contact them by email and through their help system to
ask how long this is going to take, and whether a human being is ever going to actually read my emails, but haven’t heard anything back.
I wouldn’t care, if I could at least delete my account: but I can’t, because I can’t log in to do so. They’re holding my data captive. My account still “looks” like it’s fine, so my
friends try to contact me, invite me to things, etc., and I never hear about it. It’s a good job that I don’t use Facebook to log in to anything (that I’m aware of), or else I
probably wouldn’t be able to use that too.
What do I do, Reddit? Is there some trick to actually getting Facebook to listen to you, or at least some way to delete your account without being permitted to log in to it?
tl;dr I’m banned from Facebook for using a fake name, but I’m not using a fake name. They’ve asked me to prove it, and I have (three weeks ago), but they just keep replying to
ask me to prove it again.
The message I see when I try to log in to Facebook. Sadly, I'm also prohibited from using Pidgin to connect to Facebook Chat, which is just about the only thing I use Facebook for
these days.
Okay, that’s not what that message actually says, but that’s how I chose to read it. It turns out that my name isn’t
real. I went through their forms to tell them that “no, really, this is my name”. They also asked me “what I use Facebook for”, to which I – of course – answered “chatting to friends
and stalking exes, same as everybody else – why, what do YOU use Facebook for?” But when I submitted the form, it just ran me back around in a circle back to where I started.
Also: Facebook! Is that exposed HTML code in your message? Dear me.
I’d be less frustrated if I didn’t just send them a copy of my driving license earlier this year, in order to prove that my name was really my name. I guess that the media
claims that Facebook keeps all of your information indefinitely aren’t true, and in actual fact they have the memory of a proverbial goldfish.
I’d be more frustrated if I actually used Facebook for anything more than pushing blog posts out to people who prefer to see them on Facebook, and occasionally chatting to people,
thanks to the wonderful pidgin-facebookchat plugin.
So on average, I suppose, I’m pretty indifferent. That’s the Facebook way.
Just a quick thought: what does it say on the inside front cover of the
Queen‘s passport?
A British passport, with its famous inside text.
Presumably it ought to say:
My Secretary of State requests and requires in my name all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or
hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary.
Nonetheless, I’ll bet that she doesn’t get as much trouble at passport control as I do, despite the fact that she doesn’t have a surname at all (to be completely accurate, Windsor is the name of
her royal house, and is not a surname in the conventional sense). It makes the Passport Office look a little silly to complain about my unusually short name.
Interesting fact about passports: in their current form, they’re a comparatively new invention, but have achieved a rather quick ubiquity in international travel. Historically, the term “port” in their name doesn’t refer,
as you’d expect, to sea ports, but instead to the “portes” (gates) of walled cities: most early passports granted the bearer the permission of their lord or monarch to travel between
cities in their own country – sea ports and international boundaries were considered fair game for anybody to cross.
It was only really with the outbreak of the First World War that it became a widespread mandate that travellers had passports to cross international borders, as the nations of Europe
fought to prevent spies. The Schengen Area – only around 25 years old and
hailed as welcome liberalisation of European international transit laws – could actually be likened to a step backwards to a simpler time when citizens movements were not so closely
monitored.
Never before have I come across a wine so obviously created for me as this one.
Bottles of white and red 'pro-mis-Q-ous' wine.
I haven’t tasted it, and I’ve never seen it for sale. But just look at the label: it’s called pro-mis-Q-ous, a deliberate mis-spelling of
“promiscuous” that substitutes in and emphasises the letter Q (which, of course, is my surname). The label goes
on to define promiscuity, and it – and their website, makes significant mention on nonmonogamy, which few will by surprised to hear is pretty close to my heart too.
My Name Is Me. I choose to participate on much of the Internet by my full name. I say “full name”, rather than “real name”, because the term “real name” is full of loaded
connotations. For example, I (still) periodically have people insist that Dan Q isn’t my real name, because it’s not the name I was born with. It doesn’t matter to them
that it’s the name I’m known by to pretty much everybody (except my mother, who still calls me Daniel). It doesn’t matter that it’s the name on my passport or driving license. To them,
it’s not “real” because to them, real names are either those acquired by birth or marriage, and somehow nothing else is valid. And that’s without even looking at the number of times
I’ve been discriminated against because my name is “too short” for ill-designed computer systems.
That doesn’t bother me. What does bother me is that sites like Facebook and – in the
news recently on this very topic – Google+ demand that full “real” names are used on the profiles of their site users. If you
don’t use the name that appears on your government-issued documentation (if you have such a thing), then your accounts on these sites are liable to be closed. By the way: the same is
theoretically true of your Google Profile, too, so even if you’re not on the Google+ bandwagon and you, say, use a nickname in your Google Profile, your account is still at risk.
Now, I can see the point that these policies are trying to make. In fact, there was a time that I’d have naively agreed with them. They’re trying to make the Internet a safer,
more-accountable place. But in actual fact, there’s a real risk that they’ll make the Internet a lot more-treacherous for some people. I shan’t bother listing folks who are affected,
because others have done it far
more-thoroughly than I ever could.
But I shall point you in the direction of my.nameis.me, where you can read a little more about these issues.
Thanks.
I talk a lot. If you don’t want to listen to me ramble, and you’re just looking for the free deed poll generator, click here.
After Claire and I changed our names back in 2007, I actually took the time to do a little research into deeds poll (or, more-specifically in this case, deeds of change of name). It turns out that we did it the wrong way. We paid a company to do all of the paperwork for
us, and – while it wasn’t terribly expensive – but it wasn’t free, and “free” is exactly how much it ought to cost.
In the intervening years I’ve helped several friends to change their names via deeds poll (yes, “deeds poll” is the correct plural), and I’ve learned more and more about why the whole
process should be simpler and cheaper than many people would have you believe.
A deed poll, by definition, is nothing more than a promise signed by one person (it’s not even a contract – it’s got little more weight than a New Year’s resolution), on paper which
has straight edges. That’s what the word “poll” actually means: that the paper has straight edges. Why? Because back then, a contract would typically be cut into two on an irregular line, so that when the
two halves came together it would be clear that they were originally part of the same document – an anti-forgery measure. A deed poll, because it’s signed only by one person, doesn’t
need to be separated like this, and so it has straight edges.
The Charter of the Clerecía de Ledesma, a contract from 1252 - note the cut top edge where it originally joined to the "other half" of the contract.
That means that’s it’s perfectly legitimate for you to write, on the back of a napkin, “I have given up my name [former name] and have adopted for all purposes the name [new name].
Signed as a deed on [date] as [former name] and [new name]. Witnessed by [witnesses signature(s)].”
The problem comes when you send that napkin off to the Inland Revenue, or the DVLA, or the Passport Office, and they send it back and laugh. You see, it helps a hell of a lot if your
deed poll looks sort-of official. You ought to put some work into making it look nice, because that makes a world of difference when you ask people to believe it. That’s
not to say that they won’t laugh at you anyway – the Passport Office certainly laughed at me – but at least they’ll accept your name change if it has an air of authority
and is covered with all of the most-relevant legalese.
Behind the dozens of scam artists who’ll charge you £10, £20, £30, or even more to produce you an “official” deed poll (tip: there’s no such thing), there are one or two “free”
services, too. But even the best of these has problems: the site is riddled with advertisements, the document isn’t produced instantly, you’re limited in how many deed polls you can
generate, and – perhaps worst of all – you have to give them your email address in order to get the password to open the documents they give you. What gives?
Generate free UK deeds of name change at freedeedpoll.org.uk.
So I’ve made my own. It’s completely free to use and it’s available at freedeedpoll.org.uk: so what are you waiting for – go and change your name! Oh, and it’s also open-source, so if you want to see how it works (or even make your own version), you
can.
Why? Well: I don’t like feeling like I’ve been scammed out of money, so if I can help just one person change their name for free who might otherwise have been conned into paying for
something that they didn’t need: well, then I’ve won. So change your name or help your friends and family to, on me, or just download my code and learn a little bit about Ruby, Sinatra,
and Prawn (the technologies that power the site). What’re you waiting for?
