Google+ relaxes real-name policy, allows pseudonyms
plus.google.com
plus.google.com
Google's statement is obvious bullshit, and
here's why. The way you "support" pseudonyms is as
follows:
1. Stop deleting peoples' accounts when you suspect
that the name they are using is not their legal
name.
2. There is no step 2.
And for example, in case the name represents an online identity, you have to have a "meaningful following" -- basically, there can be only one +Madonna, except these aren't random/made-up user handles, such as on Twitter.
Also, most importantly, Google+ still bans anonymity.
UPDATE 2: I was partly mistaken in my conclusions. See comments by @ElbertF below.
[1] http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/10/eff-declares-premature-victo...
Where did this sudden bout of incompetence come from, exactly?
Side note: I respect jwz, but I can't take anyone who says "Fuck those guys, seriously" seriously.
Twitter does this much better. They allow people to be whatever/whomever they want. But in case YOUR identity is important to you and your following, then you can get your account verified: https://support.twitter.com/groups/31-twitter-basics/topics/...
Well, Twitter isn't providing this to the public anymore. Mostly because they are saying that the surest way to prove legitimacy is to link to your Twitter account from your website, or other properties.
Isn't this so much better?
It is better and I'll tell you why. This G+ policy won't stop bogus accounts because Google can't verify all the accounts created. But guess who'll get hurt - it won't be the spammers that sell viagra.
1. Spammer signs up with fake name (something like John Smith) and either has no profile picture or some picture pulled off Google. 2. Spammer adds users to their circles. 3. Users see the circle request, but, since this is just some random person adding them, they don't reciprocate.
In this interaction, spammers don't have an avenue of communication except via their username. If they could use a pseudonym, their username could be www.getcheapp1llz-ezi.ly, which would be as effective a way as ever to get people to go to their site.
On a site like twitter, where usernames are not limited by any criteria that I'm aware of, the spammer would have the medium of username as a communication method.
Now how much of this is relevant to modern times, where spammers are mainly working on SEO for spam websites? I don't know.
For what it's worth, I know a few people on G+ who clearly have a pseudonym as their name and they haven't been banned yet.
1) spammer picks someone popular, signs-up with
similar name + similar picture
2) spammer starts following the same people and
some of those people will follow back
3) spammer starts spamming
4) Google notices and bans account after some time
5) repeat from step 1
Unverified usernames do not inevitably result in a site that is overrun by spam. Time-tested methods of downvoting, flagging, reporting, and semi-automated filtering can quickly dispatch such shell accounts. You only need to look to reddit for proof of this--a site where users sometimes employ their username as the punchline to the joke. That's right, a username can be an avenue of communication in itself that carries positive, non-spammy (and dare I say fun?) results. Another example: would @shitmydadsays have caught on fire the way it did if the account was named +Justin Halpern instead? I doubt it. The final obvious example: HN, which thankfully does not require "verified" identities.
When I read discourses from Google like the OP's it reminds me how right moot is when he says that creativity is only preserved in a culture that values privacy and anonymity. When everybody is permanently attached to every action, nobody bothers to test the norms, and all that's left is consumption of "safe" content from centralized producers. Of course that's what Google and Facebook, being glorified advertising networks, actually want. Your anonymous account has no money to buy anything, no predictable real-world holdings or credit score or behavior, and therefore no value to an advertiser.
It would help with data hygiene. It would also integrate nicely with a no-keyboard computer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA "The aardvark admitted its fault."
What should they know better? What's the downside to Google from any names policy they've stated or implemented since they started? None to their bottom line is my assumption.
How does a few disgruntled hippies (I'm one) with non-Wasp names compare against the bottom line value of total information awareness?
As for squatting, that only works if you assume the real names are enforced to be unique, which I don't think anyone has suggested will happen. The only group that does that (as far as I know) is SAG and similar unions.
Systems are "ripe for abuse" in proportion to their expressive power. Consequently, any really great system will have this property.
Google understood this when they went into the Gmail business and found a place where their analytic talent was well-employed.
Google should focus on finding ways that they can contribute to others' success (their billions of users, current and potential) instead of trying to find ways to corral and leverage their users as part of a grand strategy.
"we’ll be adding support for alternate names – be they nicknames, maiden names, or names in another script – alongside your common name."
The whole point of a nickname/handle/etc is to disconnect it from your real identity. Google wants Google+ to be a phonebook connecting people to their semi-anonymous nicks?
Google can go fuck themselves. Thankfully all of the hot girls are still using Twitter and FB; I'll stick with those and leave the geeky stuff to semi-anonymous participation on the internet's various sub-communities.
¹: As opposed to philosophical issues like centralisation or privacy.
"Our name check is therefore looking, not for things that don’t look like “your” name, but for things which don’t look like names, period. In fact, we do not give a damn whether the name posted is “your” name or not: we will not challenge you on this basis, nor is there any mechanism for other users to cause you to be challenged for this."
Also, I take away from this quote that an account such as Fake Steve Jobs would not be allowed, right? Daniel Lyons, the editor behind the Fake Steve identity, revealed himself after 14 months and his anonymity was pretty cool.
"The other case is people such as +trench coat, who are so well-known under this handle that it would be bizarre not to let them onto the system under this name. For this case, we allow appeals based on being well-known under the name: thus the ability to prove the 'established pseudonym.'"
Problem solved!
The tldr is that it's a notoriously difficult law to comply with unless (1) your site has limited userbase or functionality, or (2) you delete children's accounts on sight.
Some verification / disproving would be welcome.
What is in the law is an onus of responsiblity on service providers like Google to protect people under 13. So the response of Google/Facebook etc.. simply make it part of their terms that children cannot use their services - and will be summarily deleted if they do. (Google policy not 'the law').
Net result is parents help their kids online by showing them how to lie about their age. Google's ass remains covered but they are not able to actually protect kids because they don't know their ages.
Not good enough by any stretch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pro...
"The other important thing it’s trying to catch is people who are creating individual accounts, rather than +Pages, for non-human entities such as businesses or organizations. The behavior of +Pages is deliberately restricted in the system, and we don’t want people to be creating fake human accounts to circumvent that. The name check turns out to be a very powerful tool to catch these."
This is followed by the previous quote.
Won't be using G+ anyway, breaking trust is a one-way road for some of us. I also use FB with strictly fake data.
2) The criteria are still unclear. At what point does it stop looking like my real name? Should I play safe and go with John Smith? Is that maybe already very suspicious and probably not my name, period? How creative can I get choosing the required fake name without triggering this alarm that would block my profile?
3) This defeats the whole purpose of the policy in the first place. A "real name policy" (call it community guidelines or whatever, if you like) only makes sense if you verify the names. Otherwise it is a 'no funny names' (what's considered funny?) or 'no offensive names' (recently mentioned on Raymond Chen's blog: Microsoft changed the internal abbreviation of customer from 'cu' to 'cx', because the former is an offensive word in Portuguese.. Where's the limit?) policy.
For all intents and purposes: There is _zero_ progress here, and it really took them a loooong time to add an additional simple field to their data model, plus two options on how you want to render it on your profile.
And - nicknames are only useful for searching/lookups. I can put them up in my 'about' section. Google is a _search company_. I doubt that it was impossible to find people that wrote 'Hey, this is MikeMasterOfGuitarHero' anywhere near their profile by knowing that particular name. But being _only_ available using a name that you pick yourself - that's still missing.
Funny way to word it. Anyway, I did say I am not for real name policies.
(To be honest, I do find it really weird to be using my real name online. "Jonathan has shared XXX" sounds stupid to me, because nobody in real life calls me Jonathan. But that's how I write my first name.
I would prefer "jrockway has shared XXX", since that is more "me" than a first name that 239483 other people have.)
seems to be the one concession from their policy so far (I consider linking pseudonyms to the real name a screw-you more than a concession).
I'm not sure how established Cuddly Bunny would have to be, but that person would have to work at their identity on a more tolerant site for some time, at which point Google+ needs them more than they do. Hopefully these friendlier sites won't follow Google and Facebook's lead.
This is weird, isn't it. It makes me wonder what problem Google and Facebook are trying to solve with "social networking". They're basically sites that you go to because you're you, rather than other sites on the Internet that you go to because the content interests you. The rest of the Internet doesn't care what your name is. If you abuse your posting privileges (or whatever), you just get banned, end of story.
In short, Google allows cosmetic pseudonyms, which is great, but they didn't remove any restrictions that made the no-pseudonyms policy obnoxious in the first place. I'm hopeful that the "first steps" they refer to this as presage changes that will make the service more inclusive (and I can go back to my usual unthinking approval of the company).
[1] http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Rea... -- originally I said I found it "racist and sexist", but it's not confined to racism and sexism - pretty much everyone who suffers from disadvantage is further disadvantaged by Google's stance.
Are you sure? This seems to be a persistent rumor, but other than COPA-mandated takedowns of accounts belonging to children, I haven't seen any such reports like that which stood up to scrutiny.
The time the g-mail account should have been suspended is for other violations of the g-mail TOS (e.g. age, illegal content, etc).
Could you please write "unconventional" instead?
There are good and coherent arguments for allowing anonymity and strong pseudonyms, but the accusations of racism and sexism are definitely not among them.
I am far unhappier writing "unconventional" (though users with unconventional names have been banned) because it reinforces the idea that the "convention" is Latin script. This is not the case for a huge portion of the world.
As for the accusations of sexism (and also homophobia, transphobia etc. that I didn't mention), the page I linked went into some detail about why members of some disadvantaged groups would be further disadvantaged by the name policy. Were there concrete rebuttals you wanted to make to them? I use "sexist" in the structural sense of disadvantaging (maybe indirectly) women on average more than men rather than imagining Gundotra and Horowitz waking up each morning thinking "how can we keep the wimminz down today?"
Please read through Yonatan Zunger's comments on the original post - in particular "Our name check is therefore looking, not for things that don’t look like “your” name, but for things which don’t look like names, period. In fact, we do not give a damn whether the name posted is “your” name or not: we will not challenge you on this basis, nor is there any mechanism for other users to cause you to be challenged for this."
There was a lot of research done to understand what names "look like" around the world and for many different cultures. There was also work to make sure that the human review process had both reviewers in place from the various cultures and that there was an effective process in place to make sure that reviews were routed appropriately.
"people who want a persistent identity unlinked to details that could expose them in real life be continue to be unable to use the service"
Google+ will no longer require you to provide your real or legal name. Just something that looks like a name. Were you asking for something more?
I understand that Google did a lot of research in designing the real names policy, and that there are culturally aware teams implementing them. I don't really understand how they determine what's a likely-looking name--even in English, there are a great number of naming cultures: I would imagine the name StJohn Fetherstonhaugh looks as unlikely to an American as Page Lane does to someone from England, but both are "real" names. Would they be routed to the same team?
When you broaden this to the entire world, my confidence in Google's ability to do what is effectively a tedious customer service job falters, especially when you consider that the exact spelling of one's name can be a contentious issue in some parts of the world if one identifies as a particular ethnicity.
What more would I like? I'd like Yonatan Zunger's explanation to be made official policy; I'd also like to know what would happen if I sign up as Fifi Trixibelle Honeyblossom Peaches Pixie Heavenly Hiranni Tigerlily[0] Harlow (not my real name, but equally obviously someone's real name, and thus "name-shaped"), and I'm flagged what recourse I have that doesn't involve changing my name on Google+.
Yonatan has a great thread going on in his personal account where he is responding to questions from users. He is the primary architect of both G+ and the new policy. I would recommend reading through it and posting your questions there (https://plus.google.com/u/0/103389452828130864950/posts/YJbz...)
I know that the team would appreciate real-world examples of names that are edge cases, or that would likely be false-positives in the current system.
As far as how they determine what it means to be "name-shaped", I'll just copy one of Yonatan's responses. I really recommend reading through the thread.
"OK, and now to answer the really damned tough question of "just how the heck do you define name-shapedness?" And I can't go in to too many of the technical details, but the zeroth-order answer is "using humans, boosted by computers." Humans look at names and flag things which look like they aren't names; anything which is flagged gets reviewed by lots more humans, cross-checked, vetted by people with cultural familiarity, etc. This process tries to err on the side of treating things as OK. (!) We also build up computer models to basically cache this and handle the "easy" cases automatically, since obviously having humans do everything doesn't scale. The goal is that most things which are marked as "not a name" are genuinely cases of something being meant as either a nickname or an organization; whenever the appeals process is triggered, and even more so whenever something passes an appeal, that's a sign that the first-stage check failed and we need to improve our rules. So then we can look at the pattern of appeals, see if there are classes of names which we are systematically getting wrong, and learn from this to improve the process and reduce the chance of someone being sent through it incorrectly."
(Shortly after the beginning of the #nymwars, I changed my "real name" on Google+ and Facebook to a transliteration.)
Edit: I see, Mashable got some quotes from Horowitz that aren't in the original Google+ post: http://mashable.com/2012/01/23/google-plus-allows-pseudonyms...
Google+ is not, however, accepting new pseudonyms. This is designed for “established ones.” Horowitz explained that the new account naming option is intended for “people who have earned credit in other social systems and want to redeem that credit in Google+”.
This is really important since you have to fill out a Google+ profile when you sign up for a Gmail account. I can't believe they would throw away the ability to make an anonymous email account.
> The vast majority of users sail through our signup process -- in fact, only about 0.1% submit name appeals.
- References to an established identity offline in
print media, news articles, etc
- Scanned official documentation, such as a
driver’s license
- Proof of an established identity online with a
meaningful following
You could argue that they should be supporting accounts for kids under 13 with parental permission (like Yahoo does, for instance), but that's not the same thing.
Edit: and to preempt some class of responses: yes, as has been covered on HN before, COPPA has a clause that says not to warn users that setting their age to under 13 will prevent them from accessing content, and that you can't (generally) let them go back and change it later.
If Facebook/Twitter bans you, you don't lose access to Gmail. It makes no sense.
It's not "easier" to do that, it's just what you have to do since it's so difficult to make any social / messaging service COPA-compliant.
I'm not sure that COPPA applies to GMail. Certainly, Yahoo mail doesn't stop me from entering a birth-date under the age of 13 when signing up for it.
That's different from how they would handle it if they had an existing account on Yahoo Mail and found out that the owner was less than 13 - I suspect they would have to turn it off as well, because they won't let you create a non-COPPA account once you've admitted you're under 13.
http://cowbelljs.blogspot.com/2012/01/whats-in-name-database...
Names aren't simply complicated, they're mutable, they fit into Chris Pool's concept of "people are prismatic".
Google isn't exactly a babe in the woods anymore, they know better than this, why is everything around Google+ policy issues being handled in such a half-assed, tone-deaf manner?
Maybe we'll have to agree to disagree, but I wouldn't characterize a public post by the Product VP for Google+ as an unofficial comment that's buried.
I'm sorry that the handling has come across as tone-deaf. From my perspective the leadership had a strong vision for the product and had some strongly held assumptions and opinions about how best to achieve that vision.
I see today's announced change as evidence that the leadership is listening to the feedback and looking at data and then re-checking some of their basic assumptions and adjusting.
There is - of course - plenty of room to disagree. I'm not trying to get in an argument here, or to re-hash the arguments that have been going on within the company. I'm just an engineer that cares about the product and I'm trying to provide information and answer some questions
This is kind of the point, actually. Or perhaps a side-effect of it. You (that is, Googlers in general) live in a bubble where that sort of information becomes common knowledge. You have large quantities of context unavailable to the outside world, and seem utterly unable, at least when it comes to Google+, to step outside of that context and figure out how to communicate with people outside of Google who have a billion other things to worry about in the ordinary course of their lives that are far more important to them than Google.
> From my perspective the leadership had a strong vision for the product and had some strongly held assumptions and opinions about how best to achieve that vision.
This is more indication of the bubble. Google's leadership may have had such a vision, and may have communicated it with some clarity internally, but it was not communicated to the outside world.
By and large you guys have huge brains, but you need to shut them off for a minute. Read about Google+ from the perspective of what you probably consider to be a stupid person. Notice how nothing makes sense. Then realize that the "stupid" person you're envisioning is actually the 7 billion people on Earth who do not have the context of working at Google.
We all live in bubbles of various sorts. Working at Google is clearly a bubble of a sort. A lot of more information gets shared internally than gets released publicly. As a mild digression - sometimes it gets hard to keep track of what information is private and what has been shared publicly. I think most of us err on the side of caution and default to talking less than more.
"figure out how to communicate with people outside of Google who have a billion other things to worry about in the ordinary course of their lives that are far more important to them than Google"
This is where I'm sure there is a lot of ground for debate on how an announcement like this should have been made.
On one hand, I could argue that - given that there are a lot of people that could care less about Google, or about this announcement - posting it on Google+ was exactly the right thing to do, since the announcement was about Google+.
After all - HN is itself a big bubble and there are plenty of topics that people within the HN bubble care passionately about but that people outside of this particular bubble care much less about <shrug>. The G+ names policy is (IMO) one of those issues. It's a topic that people seem to either be really passionate about, or completely indifferent. I'd say the portion that care passionately is over-represented in the HN community (for the record - there are probably even a higher percentage that are passionate about it within the company. This was, and is, a hotly debated topic internally).
I'm not necessarily saying you're wrong about whether making this particular announcement on G+ was the best move - just that I think it was a reasonable one.
"Google's leadership may have had such a vision, and may have communicated it with some clarity internally"
It wasn't really messaged much differently or with much more clarity within the company, as far as I can tell.
My perspective comes more from having a front-row seat for watching the sausage being made :-) (obviously this is something that is hard to scale)
There is - unfortunately - very little hard science or hard data available for how to put together a product like G+. A lot of it comes down to having a vision, making some assumptions and trying to build a product around those. And then paying attention to what happens.
There have been plenty of decisions about the design and policies surrounding G+ that I haven't agreed with over time. What I have respected, though, is the fact that the team and the leadership have listened and have paid attention and have made course corrections as things have developed. There have been more of those that we got to witness while the product was still in internal-only beta. This is kind-of the first significant course correction that is publicly visible. I'm sure it won't be the last.
I've also observed during the making of G+ that it can be easy to posit ulterior motives to people when they are making decisions that just seem so wrong to you. I've been guilty of this myself :-) Over time, Vic/Brad/Yonatan/et al. have won my trust that there aren't ulterior motives behind the decisions, just strongly held opinions/assumptions/visions that are different than my own.
I don't know how to share that with the world, other than to show up here and talk to people when I have something to say :-)
--
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2012 02:23:51 +0000
Subject: Your Google+ Appeal
From: 1165307103153794475-noreply@google.com
Hello,
After reviewing your appeal, we have determined that your name does not comply with the Google+ Names Policy.
...
Maybe give a few days?
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/pseudonyms-on-google-pl...
You didn't include in your post any context about the rejection - when you changed you name, what you tried to change it to, why you think it meets the need policy, etc.
If you think you have a legitimate false positive, I can assure that Yonatan would be very interested in hearing the details and I would be willing to bet that if you asked a question on his post you would get a response.
The subgroup of people who prefer pseudo-names is relatively small compared to the larger population. It seemed pretty clear that they'd become more lax after attracting enough users who didn't mind using their given names. I am surprised that they added another field for it, though. I figured they'd just stop enforcing the policy.
apart from facebook (which cleverly leveraged existing relationships to create a culture where 'real' names were expected) virtually every single internet community is comprised of people operating under pseudonyms. i'd say the subgroup of people who prefer pseudo-names is the larger population.
They wanted a product that took your social life online. To that end, they tried to attract those kinds of people. The majority of sites with pseudonyms are open forums or comment boards. Most of the people you meet there you've never met offline. You can't offer people like that photo-tagging software or groups to set up real-life meets.
To chadmalik and gurkendoktor: Both of you are right. There are justifications for concern over privacy and I think Google went too far in enforcing its policy.
In fact, only the hackers I know use their real names online because they're freelancers and build a presence. I wonder if that leads to the assumption among hackers that only weirdos would ever need this feature. Stating that only n% of n% of n% would ever need privacy actually sounds even more insulting than just calling us "weirdos".
This is akin to Metallica's BS move regarding tapers after gaining their position because of tapers. You can't ever really trust people that forget where they come from.