The Rise of Alter Egos In Everybody's Space

Arwa Zafar, 26, a law student in Harrisburg, Pa., started using a fake name on her Facebook profile six months ago after her professors told students to take down their social network profiles while applying for summer internships. Two people from her school had missed out on jobs because of material they posted online, she was told.

Zafar also wanted to cut down on the number of strangers asking to be her friend.

"I used to get 10 random requests a day," she said. "I'm not on there to meet new people; I'm there to keep in touch with the people I already know."

But Facebook does not allow members to go by nicknames, initials or other pseudonyms on the site and will deactivate accounts found to be using a fake name. Chris Kelly, Facebook's chief privacy officer, said using real names encourages people to be accountable for their online behavior.

"Facebook is not a place to experiment with your identity and have six different profiles that you use based on what day of the week it is and what persona you want to inhabit," he said. "It's meant to be a place to share real-life social context."

Facebook has encountered criticism for making personal details about its members too visible, most notably by initially allowing its Beacon feature to broadcast users' purchases to online friends. (The site later allowed members to opt in to the feature.) Facebook has added privacy controls that allow members to limit the information visible to different subsets of friends, so a person's boss, for instance, will see a different page than family members will see. Members can also decide whether their profile can be found by outside search engines.

MySpace also allows users to control how much information can be seen by others and has tighter privacy settings for younger users. The site is developing tools to let users preserve social distinctions between groups of friends.

The problem, though, is that many social networkers don't know about the privacy options and stick with the default settings, which allow visitors to see everything, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

"People think they are disclosing information to their friends when much of it is available to strangers," he said, adding that "a lot of people won't bother navigating through the privacy preferences."

About 20 percent of Facebook's members use some level of privacy controls, Kelly said.

As online social lives grow, so do the difficulties of juggling various groups of friends. Two weeks ago, Saba Khan, 21, dropped her full name from her Facebook profile, partly so strangers cannot tell her gender. She also deleted many of her photo albums from the site.

Khan, a pre-med student in Orlando, was bombarded with strange comments from people she didn't know. Now she requires people outside her network to enter her e-mail address to contact her.

The different cultures of Facebook and MySpace, the two largest U.S. social networks, have influenced the actions some members take to ensure privacy, said Catherine Dwyer, a lecturer at Pace University who has studied trust and privacy concerns on the sites. Facebook started exclusively for college students and therefore created a greater sense of trust among members than MySpace, which took a more open-door approach, she said. Now that Facebook is also open to anyone with an e-mail address, people are starting to pull back a bit. Her research conducted last year showed that nearly all of Facebook's 70 million members use their real names, while less than half of MySpace's 110 million members use theirs.

Rather than changing their names, Dwyer said some cautious socializers exchange cryptic messages that outsiders cannot understand, she said.

Facebook user Katherine Kennedy, 23, who runs her own public relations firm in the District, has more than 2,300 friends, including professional acquaintances, clients and long-time pals. It's tough to keep in touch with them all, she said, so she started a separate profile for close friends so she can be freer in what she shares online.

"I think it's definitely the case that people are trying to create different circles. We obviously portray different selves when we're with different groups of people," said Eszter Hargittai, assistant professor of communication studies and sociology at Northwestern University, who said she has also considered starting a different profile to communicate just with friends. "A one-size-fits-all approach doesn't work."