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.
That reality was made all too clear for Sydneysider Elmo Keep this month when she tried to login to her account and was told she was banned for violating the site's terms of use.
She is the latest in a string of people to be banned from the site without any prior warning or recourse because Facebook believed they were not using their real names.
Other names who have previously faced the wrath of Facebook's name police include US political blogger Jon Swift, Japanese author Hiroko Yoda, British member of Parliament Steve Webb, Australian graphic designer Beta Yee, New Zealander Rowena Gay and countless others with names including "podcast", "beaver", "jelly", "beer" and "duck".
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.
Keep, 27, a rock critic from Surry Hills, relies on the site as her primary way of keeping in touch with friends and as a way of soliciting freelance writing work.
Ironically, she is also one of the site's biggest cheerleaders, working as an online journalism lecturer at the University of Technology, Sydney, and consulting for businesses on how they can incorporate social networking into their business strategy.
So when Facebook decided to ban her account without warning, it was like Keep's whole world had been ripped out from under her. Having contribued more than 1000 posted items to the site since she joined 18 months ago, Keep's absence was quickly noticed by the 300 people on her friends list.
"People left these eulogies. It was like I'd died; it was very weird," she said, adding that she felt isolated and unable to engage with what her friends were doing.
Unable to log in to her account, Keep was left with no way of contacting Facebook to find out why she was banned. She said she never thought to back up data she had stored on the site such as her photos and contacts.
Keep eventually found a Facebook email address with the help of a friend but initially only received formulaic responses that "sounded like they were written by those automated response bots".
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".
"They're holding my own data to ransom ... at the end of the day they own everything that you put up there," she said.
Keep had her account reinstated after she sent the site copies of her passport and driver's license, leading her to believe she was banned because Facebook thought she was using a bogus name on the site. Elmo is the furry red monster on the children's television show Sesame Street.
"I don't know why it wasn't easy for someone to write back on a personal level and say, 'Hey, this is what's happened.' But it wasn't like that at all," she said.
Facebook says it forces people to give their real name and date of birth on the site to make the web more credible by preventing people from hiding behind pseudonyms or impersonating others. It wants people's profiles to be a genuine reflection of who they are offline.
Ironically, the rule has meant people with genuinely unusual names are forced to sign up with fake names to avoid being banned.
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.
The whole experience has led Keep to question the sense in relying so heavily on social networking sites and entrusting a faceless corporation with so much of our personal information.
"People take for granted I think that it is a service provided by a corporate but because it features such familiarity of your own and it is that idea of a 'my space' that you've created, you kind of forget that it is actually a business model controlled by someone else as they see fit," she said.
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