How else would you avoid people identifying who you are online, other than not posting any identifiable information? If you post your home address and phone number on Facebook and people start prank calling you in the middle of the night and sending pizzas to your house, is Facebook really to blame here?
> A couple of days ago Facebook suspended my account as apparently someone had reported me as having a fake name on there. It advised I needed to upload a copy of my ID to get the account unlocked. I sent them a copy of my driving licence to prove my name was real. Today Facebook has unlocked my account but has added both my middle names onto my facebook account so it displays my full name to everyone. If I try to change it back on my profile page it says that I need to wait at least 60 days before updating my name again.
> I do not want my middle names on Facebook, I consider that a security risk as it is one of the questions my bank uses for security. I did not give Facebook permission to copy that data from my licence and certainly not permission to then display it to others.
> Do I have any recourse or way of getting them to change the name back? I can't see any way to contact a human as all support tickets have just been closed.
It is extremely difficult to avoid leaking information somewhere, as others have pointed out. Eventually there's a trail.
People often (or at least used to) share their current location on Twitter without having any idea they were doing it. Venmo payments default to public, again something that people often don't know.
And often it's not you who leaks the information but someone you know. Good luck controlling the social media presence of everyone in your family and circle of friends.
Okay, so again how is the site to blame if your family or friends leak your info. I agree that these sites should be defaulting most options to non public until people explicitly choose for something to be public - but beyond that, the only thing I can see working is heavily discouraging the bad behavior, and we likely need the legal system for that. All a social media company can do is ban someone for bad behavior, not fine them or throw them in jail.