This post was sparked by this article Banned for keeps on Facebook for odd name on the Sydney Morning Herald:
1. Illusion of America is the world: I found it annoying that Facebook took an arbitrary, American-myopic, way of determining what is a real name and what is not. While I understand how Facebook, being an American invention, could let slip the occasional unawareness of things non-American, I cannot imagine how anyone who had any vague sense of Japan could have so decisively decided on the inauthenticity of a name like Yoda.

2. Illusion of privacy: The Internet creates the illusion of privacy. Just because blogging in my bedroom "feels" private, it does not make it so. Private stuff on Facebook is not really private; especially when you have so many "friends" so as to make the idea of privacy moot.

3. Illusion of ownership: What feels like yours may not be yours. I am still surprised that many people think of their Facebook page as "theirs". Anything we post on the Internet we lose control of. Simple as that. I may well own the copyright to the writing I publish on the Internet. But there is nothing to stop others from simply stealing it and passing it off as theirs.

4. Illusion of constancy: When Ms Keep's Facebook account was turned off, she had no other means of engaging with the people on her Facebook account. I can only hope she had other means of contacting these people! After all, why would anyone rely on a single channel of communications for their livelihood? Especially one that is under the control of some third party? In this day and age, it is negligent to rely on one channel of communications. I have always maintained separate providers for my phones and Internet access. That way, a dumb glitch with a bill won't isolate me from my network.

5. Illusion of reliability: "she never thought to back up data she had stored on the site such as her photos and contacts." If you even half heartedly surf the net, you will quickly come across sad stories of people losing their data to hardware, software, and service failures. And yet, time and time again, some excuse will be trotted out about why there were no backups.

6. Illusion of trust: We unwittingly give away much of our identity to businesses, without seemingly a care as to what they do with it. In Singapore, many transactions require the provision of one’s NRIC (national identity card) number. As much of the government-held information is sensibly centralised, the one NRIC number can potentially give a business access to lots of scary personal stuff.