"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."
"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.
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...
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.