A few nice celebrity names images I found:
Cool Toys pic of the day - My Name Is Me
Image by rosefirerising
My Name is Me:
my.nameis.me/
Those of you who follow me in other spaces are probably already aware
of my frustration & fury over the ill-informed policies of Facebook
and Google Plus to require use of a person's legal name on their
services. As someone who has been trying to provide support to
underserved and marginalized communities and individuals for most of
my professional career (as in decades), I am intimately aware of the
dangers of being forced to use a name that might make you a target or
which might convey unnecessary information about you to those who have
no business knowing it. Others have ably pointed out how this sort of
policy effectively empowers the identity thieves and stalkers more
than it protects anyone. And others have pointed out that the
liability for privacy invasions committed via these services should
really rest with the service that forced use of the public name.
Wouldn't it be interesting if victims of identity theft started suing
Facebook?
With Google having announced that people who don't follow their naming
guidelines have four days to get their affairs in order, this is
particularly timely.
Google+ Giving Four Days' Ggrace Period to Potential Name Policy Violators:
launch.is/blog/google-giving-four-days-grace-period-to-po...
Google proves that they (a) don't get it, (b) don't care, and (c) have
no problem being the bully in grade school classroom who sucks up to
the teacher when they are watching. I am normally a huge Google fan,
but this is just too too profoundly distressing for me. That they are
entirely willing to compromise safety of victims and marginalized
persons for some vague possibility of a benefit they are unable to
clearly articulate and for which there is insufficient evidence to
justify. If this was a healthcare situation and a clinician pressed a
patient to accept a treatment with similar levels of evidence that
clinician would be at high risk of losing his license.
My Name Is Me is both an activism and advocacy site in support of
personal choice and personal control.
Rosemary Edghill:
"I don’t want to see the right to choose who we are online — to name
ourselves as we choose — taken away from us. I believe we have a
fundamental right to name ourselves, define ourselves, to share
information with others — or not share it — online and offline.
We have a right to choose our own names."
my.nameis.me/427/rosemary-edghill/
Cory Doctorow:
"Boing Boing’s best commenters and suggesters are almost all
pseudonymous, and for me, knowing the names my readers and
collaborators choose is much more interesting than knowing their
“real” names — the name someone’s parents chose is a lot less telling
than the name that person chose, after all."
my.nameis.me/393/cory-doctorow/
Albatross:
"I have used the online handle Albatross since I began using
Minnesota’s educational computer network MECC in 1975, during the Ford
Administration. MECC offered online chat, games, and discussion forums
to Minnesota students decades before the Internet made such things
commonplace."
"If a person wants to be referred to by a particular name or gender
pronoun, my transgender friends have shown me that it is simply
courteous to do so. Likewise, it is simple courtesy to allow people to
adopt whatever handles they wish in order to be addressed in online
communications."
my.nameis.me/342/albatross/
In their words:
"“My Name Is Me” is about having the freedom to be yourself online. We
want people to be able to identify themselves as they wish, rather
than being forced to choose names by social networking websites and
other online service providers.
Websites such as Facebook and Google+ ask you to use a name that
conforms to a certain standard. Though their policies vary, what they
would like you to use is the name that appears on the ID in your
wallet, your employer’s records, or on the letters your bank sends
you. They don’t understand that many people go by other names, for a
wide variety of reasons."
my.nameis.me/about/
My Name is Me provides a marvelous short list of examples of people
who are or may be harmed by forced real name policies:
"Abuse survivors
Academics
Activists
Adoptees
Artists
Authors
Bloggers
Caregivers
Celebrities
Digital natives
Fans
Free speech advocates
Gamers
Genderqueer people
Global cultures
Government employees
Internet veterans
Journalists
LGBT people
Models
Nicknamed people
People from small communities
People of color
People with disabilities
Politically active people
Professionals
Religious people
SCAdians
Sex workers
Sexual minorities
Teachers
Technologists
Website operators
Whistleblowers
Women
Young people"
They highly recommend this more complete list, with these major
categories of persons impacted by these policies.
Who is harmed by a "Real Names" policy?
geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Na...
Marginalised and endangered groups
People with direct identity concerns
Subject-related considerations
Employment-related
People whose "real names" are more complicated than you think
People with long-standing pseudonyms
People whose "real names" are extremely common or extremely rare
People who are comfortable using their uncomplicated "real names"
Even better, they give brief and clear descriptions of how the
policies might impact on persons in the example categories. Brilliant,
all the way around.
juergen
Image by Patrick Theiner
Papparazzi shot of Jürgen von der Lippe, a German TV celebrity. The picture got me 500 Euros, courtesy of the BILD tabloid newspaper (that's also the one he's holding)... never would have thought I'd take up that line of work...
