Quora Warning

Time for a reminder about basic cybersecurity: We don't use the real names of private people on the Internet. Not ever. We don't use or trust web sites that fail to warn people: Your screen name can relate to your real-world name in some way, if you think that's clever, but it should not look or sound even similar to your real-world name. If the name on your birth certificate is "Jane Doe," "Mama Deer" might be a clever screen name, but don't use "Jayne Dough."

The Internet is safest when we think of ourselves and of each other as cyberspace entities, only loosely connected to human bodies. The cyberspace entity known as Priscilla King has so far been fully embodied in only one human, although that's not the one who created "her." The body that types the words of Priscilla King is the same gender, color, and approximate age* with which Priscilla King has consistently identified, lives in the same part of the world, and lives with the same cats**. Priscilla King does not have information relating to the legal individual identity of that body. It's theoretically possible that Priscilla King might at some future time become the "real" business identity of some other body.

* Give or take a few years--different birth years have been arbitrarily assigned to Priscilla King but, in order to have been born approximately forty years old in 2006, she must obviously have been born in the 1960s.

** I've used the real names of cats who live with me. I've not used the real names, or breed identification, of animals who lived with any other real person in any post where I've given any information about the person.

I inadvertently followed someone's recommendation and checked out a site called Quora.com, earlier this week. I even tweeted an alert to an underserved market...since I can't recommend that youall visit Quora, I'll say that the questioner claims to be a blind foreign student looking for English courses that don't rely on visual presentations. Plain text is obviously not a problem for the person but fancy interactive graphics are.

This morning, I was notified that my account was being blocked because somebody had complained that "Priscilla King" is not my real name. For all I know, by this time it's possible that one of the people who've claimed that it is their real-world, legal name has set up a web site and is using that name at Quora...but "Priscilla King" is in fact my real legal business name, registered with the IRS.

Quora might have the right to ask me to pick a different screen name if mine is already in use (I am, after all, only @5PriscillaKing on Twitter, and at one time Google identified over a hundred bloggers using "Priscilla King" with or without additional middle or family names, several using cat pictures, on Google-hosted blogs). That's not a problem.

Quora does not have a right to ask that people use their real-world names, or encourage them to do that, or even allow them to do that. Strict libertarians would argue that they have the right to display the real-world names of people who choose to post them...but in doing that Quora is setting up a trail that evildoers can follow in order to do harm to people, and Quora should be held legally liable if its users are stalked, bullied, or impersonated with criminal intentions.

So, my summary of the Quora experience: Don't go there.