Which name do you choose
in your online social life?

Introduction

On the internet you play with your cards. You choose your cards and your games. If you want to play on Facebook you should write not only your real name on your card, but also your age, your sex, your country, your city, your studies, your lover and your friends. If you want to play as "NoName" you have to play on another board.

The idea of this protocol is to understand what, in our lives as online users, we could choose to express ourselves and meet our needs. If anonymity is allowed as an opportunity of free speech and to avoid discrimination, are the social networks allowing it too?

How to read the visualization

Exploring the authentication field social networks require, this visualization is meant to show the relevance of the social services' group allowing anonymity against the ones in the identifiability group. Then there is a small part (red coloured) standing between these two groups: these services ask for a lot of personal information but allow users to post using a pseudonym.

The "radar" visualization has been created to show the differences between social services categories. The graphic displays the percentage of anonymity, identifiability and pseudo-anonymity services in each category.

The "long-orizontal-scroll" visualization is meant to be like a magnifying glass: for each category it is possible to discover which social network requires which authentication field. The pattern addiction is to distinguish the mandatory fields from the optional ones.

How it has been done

Selected the social networks, they had been analyzed through their authentication fields.

The "radar" visualization has been made by positioning each category of social services on the axes, obtaining a polygon with 13 sides. The radius represents a percentage (0% is in the middle, 100% on the circumference). For each category the percentage of the three kind of access (anonylity, identifiability and pseudo-anonymity)has been calculated, and the result has been represented on the axes using three different colors. It is possible to visualize all the groups together or every single group on its own.

The "long-orizontal-scroll" visualization has been made representing with a full-color square the mandatory fields required during the registration and with a patterned square the optional fields. The color refers to the access categories and the sequence is related to the type of social services.

Findings

The balance shows that the most relevant group is the one allowing anonymity, because it represents the 56%. Online communities that want to know and show the real name of their users are not a small part. Facebook brag about being a transparent social network; ... about giving huge possibilities.

An interesting thing to notice is the small red group. The social services of this group give the possibility to their users to post with a pseudonym, but require a series of personal information to sign-up that are memorized but not showed to other users. This kind of access could be seen as a step forward into the regularization of anonymity on the web because it offers the users the possibility to remain unknown to the rest of the community, but in case of bad behaviour it allows to discover and punish the offender.

Metadata

Timestamp: 24/11/2014-28/11/2014

Data source: Wikipedia, Social services list

Related Protocol

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