U.S. Companies importing fear to Europe

One of the draft posts mentioned in the "our audience" blog was entitled "Man, no class action lawsuits here".

It was waxing lyrically about how one of the few things I miss in Deutschland are class action suits -- as in law suits, not class action lawyer suits.

U.S. companies hate class action suits and the bigger outfits spend mind boggling amounts of money on language to avoid them. They try everything, from mandatory mediation to subtly decoupling things any normal person perceives as closely tied together.

If you are employed with a U.S. company that is big enough to have an employee handbook, go and read.

One of the gems there is the language used and not used to make your performance reviews irrelevant as a way to get a promotion. But not irrelevant as a means to fire you.
Oh, you think that "COMPANY encourages employees to evaluate their performance through continuous individual feedback and an annual performance review" means that a good review gets you a promotion?

Anyhow, that was from the draft of the post. Since I have been having a bit of a tiff with Facebook, I would like to point out how class action lawsuits and FBs real name policy are linked.

Disclaimer: other companies do not insist on real names although they fall under the same laws.

Which I interpret like this: FB can sell much more if they can claim many "real" datasets.
It is not about people, it is about datasets.
Crowd-sourcing of datasets (also known as snitching) is nothing but a quality assurance measure.
But the other aspect is real: the American fear of big fat lawsuits gets imported to Europe and other places. The inordinate amount of space dedicated to protecting children in the Irish Data Commissioner/Facebook collaborative manifesto can only be explained by the fears of American lawyers.

Getting politicians onboard for a real name policy is easily achieved with fear and translates into better quality datasets.

Facebook is but one example of the importing of American fears to Europe, just a really convenient example.

In the course of my little row, I have also come to the conclusion that FB should replace the team responsible for the "real name" online help pages.

The content of the pages shows complete insensitivity towards local proper naming laws and conventions.

I checked English, German, the Frenchies, the Spanishes -- the latter are straight-up translations of the English page.

Factually and culturally insuffient for a company that tries to claim "real names" are for the community and our safety.