True, "banned" was likely a non sequitur as opposed to a straw man. Many of your other remarks are as well.
If multiple services require you to use the same identifier then those accounts are trivial for anyone to find and link.
The existence of alternative services with different terms does not address the issues raised in this thread. Neither does it change the fact that I think the existence of real name policies makes society worse. Of course I'm going to complain about that.
> Just use it as a modern telephone book.
Other people upload information about me into said book. There are various things that I can't do unless I use said book and those have nothing to do with looking up contact information.
It would be bad enough if the only issue were that the provider of the telephone book could every contact lookup. Unfortunately that is but the tip of the metaphorical iceberg.
isn't this "telephone book" just what the databroker industry does (and has been, and will continue to do)? I'm not even sure there's any bright line distinguishing databrokers from the ad-personalization industry, or credit reporting, etc.
Sure, I guess? So is someone going to argue something along the lines of privately owned real name walled garden social media being no worse than intentionally sharing all of your personal correspondence and various other metadata with a data broker? I'd be inclined to agree with such an argument but to what end?
If multiple services require you to use the same identifier then those accounts are trivial for anyone to find and link.
The existence of alternative services with different terms does not address the issues raised in this thread. Neither does it change the fact that I think the existence of real name policies makes society worse. Of course I'm going to complain about that.
> Just use it as a modern telephone book.
Other people upload information about me into said book. There are various things that I can't do unless I use said book and those have nothing to do with looking up contact information.
It would be bad enough if the only issue were that the provider of the telephone book could every contact lookup. Unfortunately that is but the tip of the metaphorical iceberg.