CUNY Academic Commons

The "Full Name" field on the BP profile is effectively the same thing as the "Display Name" field in the Dashboard.

For more context, WP uses "Display Name" when deciding what name should be put in the byline for posts, the byline for logged-in comments, and certain author-related archive pages. BP requires what has historically in the plugin been called "full name", and has more or less synced it to WP's "Display Name". In the BP context, it's used in directories, in group membership lists, on user profiles, in group forums, and so forth.

So, essentially, they play a similar role - the way that a user is described in public-facing user interfaces throughout the site - and they're programatically linked to each other in many contexts.

As far as privacy is concerned, perhaps what we want is to stop calling it "Full Name". Instead, we can use a label like "Display Name", and then have some helper text explaining that this is the text that'll be used in public contexts to describe you. We might suggest or encourage that individuals use their real name, but people could also choose abbreviations or pseudonyms.