Google+ now lets you use any name you want | Hacker News Reader

Google+ now lets you use any name you want

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407 pointssrathi250 comments

Ha, what a disaster G+ has to be for Google. They must kind of be looking at it like "ew what do we do with this thing now?"

They should've taken a more holistic and serious approach to bringing your offline identity online. Instead they tried to copy FB. They should've just called it Google Identity(with the same level of seriousness as Youtube's copyright protection product: Content ID) and provided real-life perks with associating say your Driver's license number with it which maybe would allow me to renew my driver's license much more quickly. I don't know. G+ is just weak.

I mean at the end of the day, they DO have your identity. I'm sure their algorithms could within a certainly small margin of error determine who I am to a reasonably high degree of probability based on nothing other than lines in a bunch of log files(DoubleClick Ad requests on various sites, YouTube video watch times, Google Searches based on time of day/location, mobile usage, etc); again, regardless of where or when or how I use Google(i.e. using igonito browsers, using a friend's phone, using a computer an internet cafe, etc.). So why not throw all that information under one umbrella, Google Identity, and provide it to me once I claim it.

They're likely able to treat online "behavior" as essentially unique online fingerprints and can just associate that with individual users; that is, they don't really need uniquely identifying data(unique IDs, usernames, etc.), they just need to watch your online activity(regardless of if you're logged in or have identifying cookies, etc.) for a while in order to identify you.

I assume it's because consumers probably aren't ready to know just how much data Google actually has on them AND how much information can be extracted from said data. It's likely pretty accurate and pretty scary.

Personally, I wasn't too concerned with Google knowing my actual identity, but more with the prospect of tons of information leaking to anyone who I ever meet. For example, it's no longer possible to anonymously review or rate android apps. They retroactively changed all older app reviews to be by "An anonymous user", but now all reviews and ratings are done under your Google+ account, so I just stopped reviewing and rating apps.

If I were to rate and review apps as I would prefer to do, then anyone googling my name when they meet me would find my Google+ account, then it would be trivial for them to click around and find out essentially a list of all the apps I use on a regular basis, and how I use them. I don't know that there's anything too personal at the moment, but given that that information is essentially out there forever, I don't want to accidentally rate some app that might reveal my political, religious or cultural affliations (which could bias a future employer or landlord), or something else that might be very telling about my personal life.

For me, Google having a huge trove of information on me only matters to the extent that they'd ever show it to anyone else. I don't care what they do with the data internally, I've disclosed it to them, but it's clear after the Snowden documents that Google doesn't have the ability to fight government intrusion into their databases (making their huge troves a very tempting target), and after the fiasco with Google Buzz (and this nonsense with Google+ and the "real names" policy), it's become obvious that they don't seem to have the sort of mindset that is appropriate for a good steward of my private data. It's sad, because they provide many great products, but they are simply not trustworthy - as that becomes more obvious to more people, I imagine it will start to affect their bottom line.

Even worse, any businesses or places you review on Google Maps are publicly visible under your G+ account. So an internet stalker can know exactly where you have been, what kind of establishments you visit (e.g gay bars, daycare) and approximately when.

You can hide the reviews so that they don't show up on your Google+ profile. If they are hidden, you can only see someone's review by looking at a place that they've reviewed directly.

And you could probably scrape that information from every listed restaurant in the country in a matter of seconds.

Google does not let you scrape.

That doesn't mean that you cannot still write a bot to scrape the content. If it's displayable in a web browser, then it's also parsable from Perl (or whatever language you choose).

Adding delays between page requests and/or distributing the requests would work around a lot of bot detection systems but in worst case scenario, there are projects out there that can solve Captcha's.

Essentially this can be viewed like music of movie piracy; if it can be played then it can be copied.

Sure, but throttling is going to make it really slow to gather all the data you want.

If you're stalking someone then you already have enough data to perform a more targeted scrape (ie what town to look up businesses from)

Laws do not allow employers to use information about protected characteristics to discriminate against employees (or potential employees) yet people are rightly worried about revealing that information.

People scrape Google all of the time, every day. All day long.

nounaut has the technological objection to this idea pretty much covered, but to add on to that, one of my problems is that Google has shown in many occasions that they simply don't understand why you would be concerned about keeping certain things private. That's what happened with Google Buzz, and it's something they didn't consider with their idiotic "real names" policy. The fact that you can hide your reviews today is great, but there's no forward secrecy on that. Google has shown a willingness to make privacy decisions for you in the past, and so I see no reason to trust that they won't come up with something new in the future that completely defeats the "hide my reviews" setting.

I think Google cares more about privacy than most companies.

Everyone (including Google[0]) agrees that they made privacy mistakes with Google Buzz. And I think that they've worked hard to improve privacy in their products since then. That's why Google+ has used circles from the beginning: the Google+ experience emphasizes choosing the right people to share you content with (as opposed to the standard "share with the public" or "share with all my friends" which was standard at the time). At the time when Google+ launched, it had one of the strongest sets of privacy settings on the market[1]. Other competitors have since beefed up their privacy settings to match Google.

Regarding the "Real Names" policy, I think that their goal there was to make it a community of Real People, instead of a completely anonymous community of people using cryptic usernames. And I think that they thought that people would be more likely to make connections if people saw each other's real names instead of some username they came up with. When they realized that some people only go by a username and that most of their friends don't even know their real name, they started allowing people to add their nickname to their profile so that they could be findable with both their real name and their username. I think that these decisions were good ones and I like the community that now exists because of those policies.

I agree that "Real Names" has privacy concerns, but before the policy change yesterday, Google+ had been saying that you didn't have to use your actual name if you were concerned about your privacy - you could just use any name that resembled an real name (i.e., John Smith). I agree that this is a bit wonky, but I think it was one of those hard tradeoffs. I think without such a policy, growth on Google+ would have been a lot slower, and the community would look very different.

[0]: http://gmailblog.blogspot.ca/2010/02/new-buzz-start-up-exper...

[1]: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/privacy-isnt-dead-j...

I think Google cares about privacy in the abstract, but I'm concerned that there are some fundamental mismatches between what Google considers acceptable disclosure and what I consider acceptable disclosure. I don't really understand why a "real enough" name like John Smith or something would be consistent with what they said again and again was the goal of the "real names" policy, which was that they wanted you to have a reputation to maintain so people wouldn't "act out" online. What you're saying is that they just wanted you to have western-style names, and that's all that matters?

In any case, Google Plus perfectly shows what I'm talking about, because it has had serious mission creep since the beginning. If they want to have some community where everyone is forced to use their real names, fine, I'll never join that community because it's not something that interests me. What happened then was that they became downright aggressive in trying to get people to join Google Plus by making it part of the "unified" platform with "one sign in" (and no control over what you're signed in to, mind you). Now your android reviews are all on your Google Plus account, so if you want to review an app you downloaded, you have to join their forced little "community". It's heartening that after Google Buzz they've mostly been preserving some forward secrecy (i.e. "from now on all your comments will be with your real name, stop commenting if you don't like it"), but it's clear that they're deliberately making these "tradeoffs" for you, and they clearly just don't have a corporate mindset that cares about what many people care about, so I'm deeply concerned that they'll make some serious mistakes in the future just because they don't understand what people outside their culture care about, and they don't mind taking unilateral action.

I know this is probably an unpopular idea but it seems like we set up so much infrastructure(intelligence agencies, the entire security industry, etc.) to create and secure private information that I feel like it creates an unnecessary economic burden and has an unnecessary psychological effect on people.

We as a society need to first trust a large entity(which obviously right now is not gonna happen) with as much personally identifying information as possible in the hopes of creating an authority and allowing us to navigate the "system" much more easily(like I said renewing a Driver's License, getting a welfare check more quickly, processing a zoning request more easily, getting a medical history, etc.).

After that happens, we should hopefully then feel okay about sharing that personal information publicly. Not a selective news feed like FB but the equivalent of a publicly available intelligence dossier on yourself that anyone(including yourself) has free access to. I know it seems crazy, but I really believe that's where it's headed anyway.

No more background checks or credit score checks or walled gardens etc. My current location, my current heart rate, my arrest record, all my google searches(eesh) my last mammogram or testicular cancer exam, etc. is on display for all(including myself) to check and find out instantly and for free. The world would collapse. Economies might actually collapse though.

Obviously, society is not ready for that sort of thing just yet, but that should have been the direction Google should have gone with Google+(or Google Identity or whatever they want to call it) eventually.

You can't index the world's information if most of it is "private".

I'm not sure why you think this dystopian vision you have wouldn't be horrible. It would have massive chilling effects on nearly everyone's behavior, since it would be incredibly efficient to seek out and socially punish anyone with transgressive viewpoints.

Protecting your privacy is worth it, and despite what you think, there are strategies that are likely to help protect quite a bit of it, if the impetus becomes strong enough.

> We as a society need to first trust a large entity

That's just not going to happen. Large entities are run by people who are inherently trustworthy. This is why there's a need for privacy. I don't want to be judged on my heart rate, physical ailments, preferred music, or any of the million other items you'd like to be public. I don't think you have any idea what harm revealing such information might cause. Say I'm gay and living in some backwards town in the south. Would I want my neighbors to find out so they can tie me up to a pickup truck and drag me to death? This is just one of infinite possibilities for harm resulting in all data being accessible. Your proposal is absolutely ludicrous.

Remember that the reverse would be true as well though. I could easily vet all the crazies out of a particular area. "This guy is a homophobe, this guy is racist, this guy a violent white supremacist as of July 15 2014. So I won't move into that neighborhood."

A person who fears for life due to their personal identity probably would be a bit adept at vetting potentially dangerous areas.

And if you're oh, say an atheist in a place like Pakistan, you do what exactly...look online to see that there's quite literally no where for you to go, have a nice glass of wine, and wait for your violent death?

For that matter, whatever gave you the idea that most people get to choose what neighborhood they're going to live in? Poor people pretty often live wherever fate deposited them. The whole idea reminds of a joke Bill Maher made during the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, the gist of which was George Bush saying something to Cheney like, "I don't understand what all those people are still doing in the Superdome. Why don't they get in their SUVs and drive to their summer homes?"

Atheism as such isn't usually such a big deal in Pakistan, what gets people's goat is the whole insulting Mohammad thing. In practice people usually leave atheists alone. But yes, I see your point.

> After that happens, we should hopefully then feel okay about sharing that personal information publicly.

Setting aside how comfortable I feel with the rest of your suggestion (I don't), this seems to miss a fundamental point: part of the reason that some information needs to be private is that it is how you authenticate yourself. In a world where you can easily get your welfare check, and where everyone else knows all relevant information about you, how do you stop someone else from getting your welfare check? (For the near future, anyway, presumably a physical presence will trump any information-based authentication; but having to be physically present for these transactions seems like it would erase the very convenience that is your goal.)

In the movie There Will Be Blood a stranger shows up to Daniel Plainview's doorstep pretending to be his half-brother. The stranger relates some story about their childhood together and that's enough to convince Plainview of the stranger's identity(which isn't his actual identity) and relation(half-brother) to Plainview. It's false of course, and Daniel isn't happy when he finds out. But it's interesting comment on the times they lived in. There was no LinkedIn or FB or even a Driver's License for that matter to verify someone was who they said they were.

Regardless, I really don't know how you actually identify someone. Likely, as you say, physically being present(retina scan, fingerprinting, both?). You raise an interesting philosophical question; that is, what is identity?

>Regardless, I really don't know how you actually identify someone. Likely, as you say, physically being present(retina scan, fingerprinting, both?). You raise an interesting philosophical question; that is, what is identity?

It's not really a philosophical question being raised. The question of identity is always, "Is the person trying to authenticate the same person as someone with whom I have some relationship?" Online, you set up a username and password, and the presumption is that any person with that username and password is the same person who set up the account. If you want to prove your "real" identity, you're basically doing the same thing, but you're instead trying to prove that you're the same person as the one who was awarded your driver's license, or the same person whose birth is certified by your birth certificate.

Not that I'm a fan, but here in Portugal we're all issued national ID cards with a private asymmetric key (ISO 7816), with which you can authenticate both offline and online. Technically, it's still hidden information, but it's not about you, just happens to be linked to you.

Replacing the card requires physical presence, of course.

Yes, it's very definitely an unpopular idea. Having all of this available will be great for people who want to find people... like, say, your violent ex, or an oppressive regime.

Or an ex finding an estranged partner and killing them - I worked at a telecoms company where this actually happened some one got a mate to look up his ex's new address/phone number and killed her.

Which is why at least in BT senior developers on some systems had TS clearance.

Would you be ok with being paying more for healthcare because you ate a candybar for lunch?

In a shared resource like health insurance, you either pay for your actions or the actions of others. If you're a health conscious person that only eats healthy food, gets 8 hours if sleep every night and participates in moderate exercise, you're paying the same premium as someone who scarfs down junk food, sleeps 3 hours per night and never exercises.

Maybe if there were a surcharge for every unhealthful thing, people would choose to be healthier and healthcare costs would actually come down.

Not sure why you got downvoted. I would be upset if what you describe happened (although it does happen to a certain degree) but I can't argue with the logic.

> Maybe if there were a surcharge for every unhealthful thing, people would choose to be healthier and healthcare costs would actually come down.

yeah,and why not a mandatory rfid chip so they can monitor your health in realtime and adjust your premium,hey?. And you are driving ? you're then more likely to have an accident so your insurance should go up.Watching TV on the sofa instead of running? not healthy! Here you pay 10% more. Running? it's not unlikely you get a heart attack, what about 5% more?

Do you have any idea how stupid you sound?

Such name calling is uncalled for on a well- meaning comment that you disagree with.

And in broad strokes the concept is sound - Why should I pay for others' bad habits? I'm much more sympathetic to things you can't control (and admittedly there is a gray zone in between).

The example that really bugs me is federally backed flood insurance. People build homes in places that aren't safe, and then taxpayers bail them out. Moral hazard.

> The example that really bugs me is federally backed flood insurance. People build homes in places that aren't safe, and then taxpayers bail them out. Moral hazard.

Hah. So, I live in the Netherlands. Do you think that everybody who lives here should move to Belgium or Germany then, given the flooding hazard here? Are the Delta Works projects a huge waste of tax payer's money? Or is it different when your entire country is at flood risk?

Of course it's different - when everyone's at risk, nobody's paying for others' foolishness.

+1 for you - not because I agree with you, but because downvote on HN shouldn't be used to express disagreement.

To be honest, one differentiator that would me use Google+ over Facebook is a -1 button.

I love to dislike things, especially if disliking them would affect their Google ranking (I'm looking at you Quora and your dark patterns!).

Not only I would love the -1 button, but also negative endorsement, and pretty much any Google+ feature, but with a negative twist.

That would really encourage me to use Google+, or should I say Google-.

A -1 button affecting search rank would be used almost entirely by dark-hat SEO firms.

How about a -1 that affects ranking ONLY to people who enables the feature and follows you?

I mean, if I follow an expert in his area, it makes more sense to me to see that he doesn't endorse spammy-website.com, than to see he endorses "Chrome Beta for Android".

This used to exist - SearchWiki gave you the opportunity to either vote up a search result or to remove it entirely. Both of these actions would affect only your own results - there were vague plans to eventually use the data to improve ranking, but the spam/SEO implications were never solved.

Basically people just used it to kill experts-exchange.com. Usage was tiny otherwise, and the experts-exchange case was fixed when StackOverflow started getting traction and Panda put the final nail into experts-exchange's coffin.

I'm honestly still surprised that YouTube has a dislike button. It must be incredibly important to their algorithms there.

But I'm 95% sure Google+ will never get a dislike button, much like Facebook. Dislike buttons don't belong in social media platforms. They sow disappointment and hurt egos (e.g. karma on reddit).

YouTube ia public and searchable and watching a video is relatively expensive, so downvotes help ranking and warn you about bad content.

Posts don't have these features, people don't read complete strangers' posts based on search queries. It's pre-curated peer user.

Do you actually have to watch the video to downvote it?

It would be trivial to check if someone has watched something before they downvoted, and adjust algorithms accordingly (ignore the vote internally and lower that voter's general impact).

> I mean at the end of the day, they DO have your identity.

This was always the dumbest thing about the real name policy: Google knew anyway. They could have let everyone have synonyms and pseudonyms until the cows came home and it would only disadvantage their competitors who don't have enough data to do the linkage of identities. Instead what they did was literally drove me away from putting any important information into G+ profile because it was linked to my real name - so Google is the loser all round.

FWIW - the Real Names policy was never about providing Google with your name. It was about the name that was displayed to others. I was never a supporter of the real names policy, but I can still understand the motivations behind it - even if I think it was a mistake.

Quoting Yonatan (tech lead for G+):

> There were quite a few things we were trying to achieve, some of which turned out to be key and some of which didn't. Greater authenticity was actually one of the big successes: it set the culture to be one where people, by default, act as themselves rather than as a persona. That makes a huge difference to how people behave, and now the culture is stable enough that it's OK to relax that. Reducing trolling, on the other hand, turned out not to be as tied to names as anyone thought. We had lots of reasons to believe that might be the case at first -- look at YouTube, 4chan, and Facebook comments back then -- but in retrospect, the dynamics which control trolling seem to be somewhat different. Or to put it a little more bluntly, people are quite willing to be assholes under their real names, too.

I find it quite interesting that they didn't realise that making people use their real names pretty much is guaranteed to make a lot of people NOT act as themselves rather than a persona.

Lots of people who are happy to "be themselves" in safe settings, around likeminded people, will "clam up" or take on a persona they don't like immediately if the alternative is that anyone can link something to their name.

Political beliefs, religious beliefs, sexual orientation etc. Even gender - there are plenty of women online in male oriented environments that are uneasy about using their real name in certain settings because of bad experiences with sexism.

If they'd bothered to listen to any of the people they affected, they'd have learned this on day one. But it ought to have been blatantly obvious: In real life we don't go around with name tags and hand out dossiers on ourselves to random strangers, which is the equivalent effect of using full real names online.

I don't know what it says about the culture of Google that this was such a hard realisation for them.

Really shows how out of touch G+ leads were from Internet users. At least they learned eventually.

Yes, but wasn't the lack of effect on trolling obvious immediately? And yet it was continued to be presented as a reason for the policy for over two more years.

Just as important as the Real Name Policy: The Multiple Profile Policy.

This is still, to me, the best way to protect my privacy. The one I use for my company is different from the one I use for me. One will outlive the other. Yet, you can maintain distinct ones. For example all my iPad Google ones require I use the same identity (therefore I make sure I don't use Google Chrome anymore). Even the incognito mode of Chrome suggest that I log in under my real name. How do they know, given it's incognito?

Finally.

I know it's a bit childish, but for my pseudonymous Google account, I kept getting these notices that they were going to disable my Google+ account unless I gave them my real name, unless I could show them documentation proving that the pseudonym was my legal name, so I just found some pictures of middle fingers and that sort of thing and photoshopped them onto a photo of a license and submitted that. They give you a few chances to submit something, so I had a little fun picking out new insulting pictures for a while, until I got bored of it (which was almost instantly).

Obviously it wasn't going to have any effect other than to virtually flip off some random person being paid to check IDs, but it was at least cathartic in the face of such a stupid, stupid policy.

I've always liked just making an image with some leaked-but-still-technically-classified information, on the (admittedly very unlikely) off chance that someone with clearance might see it and have to get themselves debriefed.

You should know that's a federal crime, if you're talking about leaked U.S. classified material. Simply because you see the Washington Post printing Snowden's leaks doesn't mean handling and distributing classified information isn't a crime. It is still classified and carries full force even though it has been printed; no "cat out of the bag" defense applies.

Very importantly, I'm not stating an opinion on this legal situation, just pointing it out.

100% Incorrect. If the OP has a security clearance, then maybe... At most he is probably in violation of the NDA he signed, not any criminal laws. To actually violate the criminal statues around Leaking classified material you have to CAUSE ACTUAL HARM to the US government.

The original leaker obviously causes harm, but the guy submitting a public document to Google for fun....that's going to be hard for a judge to believe.

It's remotely feasible that a person without a security clearance could be convicted of a crime for re publishing classified documents, but it would have to be some very odd situation.

No, it depends on the information. Read 18 U.S.C. §793 and §798.

They could be a non-US citizen who don't plan on visiting US, ever.

Google is in an ugly place right now. Not only are they beholden to the advertising agency they are now the poster boy for all the NSA spying and other controversies because of their massive information footprint, real name policies, constant nagging for phone numbers in gmail, etc.

Apple and others have positioned itself as privacy friendly as well, which is a double whammy.

I'd love to see G+ be the seedy version of Facebook. Fake names, nudity, etc. You can't beat facebook by being facebook.

Hopefully, "real names everywhere" is a fad that is dying. The search engines and employers of the world don't need to know my every political thought or see my every vacation photo. Zuckerberg's idea of the internet exists only because its profitable for him. In every other respect its insane.

> Google is in an ugly place right now.

I disagree. Massively.

After Elon Musk, and possibly partly inspired by him, Page has driven Google to be, by far, the most ambitious tech titan in the game right now.

Looking past G+ and its nonsense (which is an ugly thing, granted.): - Loon is in motion, and in conjunction with recent drone acquisitions, will likely bring internet to currently unconnected billions. - Self-driving cars are actually happening. - The smart contact lens for glucose monitoring will change the lives of diabetics. - Investments and acquisitions in AI and Robotics speak to a MASSIVE ambition in that sphere. - The recent announcements in their consumer lines with TV, Nest, Auto, and wearables are extremely competitive.

And these are just the things we know about.

Compare all this to Apple (which I love, but a Beats acquisition, a bigger iPhone, and a watch coming? Woop-de-doo.), and Facebook (how's Slingshot doing?), it's not even the same game anymore.

To say that Google is an ugly place, or that they're "beholden to the advertising agency", is naive to the bigger picture.

Every single one of the things you mentioned is a prototype, research project, or poorly performing product. The only success in that list is Nest, which Google just bought.

Yes, it's true that one or more of Google's "moon shot" projects might become massive successes. But it's also true that they might not.

Elon Musk, like Apple, focuses on products that actually ship and sell. Tesla sells great cars with great efficiency. SpaceX flies great rockets, for pay, with great efficiency. Musk came up with the Hyperloop, but (unlike Google) he's not spending any time or money on it.

Prototypes and projects they may be, they still speak to Google's greater ambitions.

They're aiming high. That's all I'm saying. It's hard to argue against that.

It's easy to forget that Tesla and SpaceX weren't always the great cars and great rockets with great efficiency they are today. Just 3-4 years ago they were both on the brink of collapse.

In one of my undergraduate business classes in 2009, one of my professors literally used Elon Musk and Tesla/SpaceX as a case study in poor management.

Like SpaceX and Tesla, Google X's moonshots deserve time to evolve.

Everything you described is Sergey, not Larry. Larry did G+.

Right right, I digress there. Still, the point of the case remains - Google is crushing it and is, along with Musk & co., absolutely one of the most exciting companies in the world to watch right now.

So is the NSA.

How long will it be until every mentioned of Google isn't followed by some sort of NSA related comment? Everyone knows, to an extent, what happened and it really adds nothing to the conversation.

Actually, Vic did G+.

> the seedy version of Facebook

I thought Facebook was the seedy version of Facebook. Or has everyone already forgotten about Facebook apps, shitty viral games, the ever-shifting Facebook platform, fake likes, bogus ad impressions and all of the other shady shit?

What you're describing is Facebook's seedyness. Your parent poster I think was describing potential user seedyness, which is currently mostly absent, or monitored against.

> Or has everyone already forgotten about Facebook apps, shitty viral games

Those at least are a problem with your friendlist. Handle facebook like mail and block spammers and you don't get any of that.

Interesting that you mention the NSA, yet position others like Apple as being "privacy friendly".

The problem, the biggest problem with the NSA is that any US company can be coerced into whatever the NSA wants, without you or me ever finding out about it, even if the company in question wants to act in good faith and protect the privacy of its customers.

If Apple was or is coerced by the NSA to install backdoors into OS X or iOS, do you think you'll find out about it? And given the popularity of Apple's operating systems, I would be surprised if that didn't happen already.

Heck, it's not even open-source we're talking about. At least then you'd be able to inspect the source and compile and deploy your own binaries. And interestingly, I find Android to be better for the privacy/security conscious, even though it was born out of Google's desires for their ads to remain relevant in a mobile world - not because I trust Google, because I don't, but because it has less restrictions on what you can do with it, it's more transparent and it allows for forks (YMMV).

On the Real Names policy, I also hope it's a fad that is dying. What a stupid policy to begin with. I also had high hopes for G+, too bad it didn't happen.

tumblr's got you covered for the seedy part...

Bing image search too, holy cow is it horrific if you turn off safe search.

That's just the internet, not Bing.

As a few minutes of WebCollage http://www.jwz.org/webcollage/ usually illustrates quite well.

Bing is not a social network.

Google actually got me to use Bing on a regular basis when they forced everyone into G-rated image search with no opt-out.

Does bing give you content you didn't search for?

You know what? Why don't you check your privilege?

http://mcdlr.com/check-your-privilege/

You'll have to be more clear than that. There's tons of porn on Tumblr. What are you disputing?

I've never found anybody who both likes laughing at this kind of stuff and is actually worth listening to.

There's a reason they're always green accounts.

"For this we apologize"

There's a lot of sniping at Google here, but I think they deserve some kudos for using the A word in corporate communications.

I was at google while the nymwars were going on. The debate was just as heated and polarizing inside google as it was externally. I'm also surprised (pleasantly) to see someone use the A word here. I think this is an attempt to start over after exit and/or political defeat of certain high level execs. But I also think it may be too late. G+ has missed the bus to be anything more than the butt of jokes and hilarious memes (A google employee ate a donut, here's a picture etc..). Certainly a lesson in there somewhere about hubris and corrupting influence of power etc.

Vic did, in fact, approve this change well before he left. (It wasn't just an overnight switch flip, hence why it took a while to actually go live - policy documents have to be rewritten and approved, ux flows have to be modified, etc.)

Maybe. You seem to have heard it directly from Vic. I think the more plausible scenario is the CEO finally having had enough and pulling the plug on both the name policy as well as Vic's tenure at google. How this sequence of events is then presented to the rest of the public (including rest of Google) would then be a matter of following a corporate playbook written by experts in that domain.

You're allowed to be cynical, but I'm also allowed to tell you that you don't know how Google works internally. :)

Aren't "apologies" fairly common? A genuine apology for the reasons people think you should apologize is much rarer, corporate communications or not.

Frankly this Google apology doesn't seem that genuine to me. What are they actually apologizing for:

> We know you've been calling for this change for a while.

should've done what people wanted, okay ...

> We know that our names policy has been unclear, and this has led to some unnecessarily difficult experiences for some of our users

No, their names policy was pretty clear actually. Legal names only.

> unnecessarily difficult experiences for some of our users

Is there a way to understate this any more? Any way we can make it vaguer too?

Some real bullshit pr speak right there.

-----

They apologize for not listening and "being unclear" about their names policy. Seems pretty worthless and insincere to me. Though i do still applaud their decision to not continue a horrible policy, like i would applaud a company deciding to revise hiring policy to be less discriminatory: would have been nice from the start, before a lot of damage was already done.

I'm happy at least someone noticed that. It's not an easy sell to any communications person anywhere in the industry. :)

I pretty much grew up on-line. I got into BBSs when 1200 baud was considered fast. The basics of having on-line identities really have changed all that much in all that time. To newer generations it's even more natural. When I see companies completely screw up basic stuff like this, I wonder if these decisions are being made by people who were never really part of the on-line world and fundamentally don't "get" it?

The people at Google making these decisions aren't some 75 year old fuddy duddy luddites, they're about my age and they're running one of the most important properties in that world. Screwing up something as basic as this has just seemed so...weird. I can only imagine that the final say-so came from somebody/people who fundamentally didn't grow up with the same kind of comfort and experience I did on-line and really doesn't understand it.

But then again, my parents, who never even used a computer until the 2000s, and never even got on-line until 2003 or 2004 get it. It seems to obvious as soon as you jump on-line that you are both empowered and need to have on-line identities that you can control.

I really wonder if the people at the top are really part of the on-line world, or just completely removed from it and spend their time wondering about all these digital ants in the digital ant farm and wondering what we're all about?

> spend their time wondering about all these digital ants in the digital ant farm and wondering what we're all about?

This announcement certainly reinforces that notion. Google+ announces as an anonymous "we", that their name policy "helped create a community made up of real people." As opposed to fake people? Anonymous people are real, so is this a reference to bots? The name policy prevented bots? No. It didn't. This is ridiculous corporate code language. So ya, pushing around their digital ants is exactly how this announcement reads.

Anonymous "we"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_%28novel%29

That is my sense as well, people who are decidedly not nerds grabbed hold of the reigns. It's been a long time since I've heard the phrase "Don't be evil".

"When we launched Google+ over three years ago, we had a lot of restrictions on what name you could use on your profile. This helped create a community made up of real people, but it also excluded a number of people who wanted to be part of it without using their real names."

I wanted to use my real name. My legal, backed by a name change order, mononymic name.

After watching them fumble it, trying to use a space or a dot, and being told to gtfo or change it to a "real" name (and once again, fuck you very hard Google, even the TSA is able to deal with this), I left.

And now I'm looking around for the giant hole in my life that can finally be filled by G+. ... looking ... looking ...

I kind of wish Google would have let you pick which display name to use on a per-circle basis. Then I could use a pseudonym with strangers, a nickname with friends, and my real name with family.

I always feel like these services are designed wrong. You want to be able to have multiple identities for different people, but having one organization that can associate them all with one another defeats a lot of the purpose of that. Especially if you're using it for anything that could get you into real trouble if e.g. someone were to break into that service and obtain or publicly disclose all the associations, like democracy activists in oppressive countries.

You can always create completely separate accounts and then use them over Tor one at a time blah blah blah, but that's a huge usability failure. What you really want is a UI that allows you to sign in to multiple accounts without the server knowing they're all the same person (which means native software, probably with something like Tor automatically using separate circuits for each account), and then allows you to seamlessly receive messages for any of them and clearly delineates which account you're sending from when you post something.

For most of us, most of the time, having the central site aware of all our pseudonyms wouldn't be a problem. Even if they divulged your identity upon lawful (court order) request. Even if they consistently targeted advertising at you, through some kind of layer that let advertisers aim at demographics without revealing ID.

Most of the time, it would be enough to have some sort of unified Google login (in a Google iframe or whatever), offered as a service to different sites on the Web, and different pseudonyms available that __don't reveal your 'true' ID or other pseudonyms to the site owner__.

I'm a little surprised that Google haven't offered some kind of 'Google Identity' service to the web at large based on this sort of idea. It wouldn't be good enough for activists in oppressive regimes, but it would offer a convenience to general people who like to keep separate identities on different sites.

> I'm a little surprised that Google haven't offered some kind of 'Google Identity' service to the web at large based on this sort of idea.

The problem, I think, is that, given the current "don't be evil, just creepily self-serving!" attitude that seems to guide Google, no one would trust them. Even if one could trust them to keep one's identity private at launch, I am sure that anything like this would come loaded with the kind of "T&C may change without notice at any time" codicil that would allow them to permit themselves to disclose your identity later.

The popularity of "Sign In with Facebook" seems to belie that.

I think that I disagree (that this is a counterexample); it shows that people want a 'one-stop' identity solution, but not that they trust Facebook to keep their identity private.

But the statement to which I was replying is "the problem is that ... no one would trust them". The popularity of "Sign In with Facebook" belies that it's a problem to not be trusted (at least when it comes to offering identity services).

Ah, I see. I was implicitly assuming that the parent's other requirement:

> different pseudonyms available that __don't reveal your 'true' ID or other pseudonyms to the site owner__

(which isn't offered by Facebook—right?—and which does require trust in the issuer) would be part of the putative Google Identity.

On the other hand, having spent this much time arguing that it wouldn't happen, I'm now wondering why OpenID with Google as 'vouching agent' (or whatever that part is called) doesn't count.

Chrome Profiles is almost that, except without the built-in Tor.

This becomes exceedingly complex (and unintuitive enough that it's likely to cause more problems than it solves) which you consider overlapping circle membership.

Agreed, and heaven forbid you screw up making a change. Now everyone on your Fetish circles list sees your real name accidentally or your family and coworkers see you as BondageBoy69.

It would be easy to have your "cover" blown, e.g. by a friend (who sees your real name) innocently mentioning your real name in the reply to one of your posts that's visible to a larger circle...

that is almost exactly how Google+ has worked for some time now. Your actual identity (real name required) was your main profile, and you can set up as many pages as you like with whatever pseudonyms you want. A page functions as a Google+ identity that can follow other people or pages and can be added to other peoples' or pages' circles, so each pseudonym has a totally distinct set of circles. It's actually a pretty clever system, but the UI and language makes it somewhat unclear what do do with it all.

Yeah, it's a UX problem. The feature is right there, but had they renamed "Pages" to "Identities" it would possibly get some traction.

> the UI and language makes it somewhat unclear what do do with it all.

That's quite an understatement.

The other aspect, is the lack of transparency Google has when making policy and product changes. Like suddenly trying to change app reviews and youtube comments from a pseudonymous to a real-name activity. Without any confidence in their service and policy stewardship, it's hard to trust them not to change this stuff randomly too.

Much better would be if I could pick names to display for other people. That way when my friend chooses a silly nonsense pseudonym I can replace it with the name I want to see.

This is a feature steam added that I really liked.

1. You have a canonical URL that identifies the user.

2. The user can have any name they want, and the name will only change if you are in a chat room, adding a (2) if they are a duplicate name.

3. Finally, you can add tags and a nickname (separately) so you can always see whatever name YOU assign to the person and the person in question can represent themselves anyway they want.

Steam is one of the few social networks I participate in because I truly believe it adds some value to the basic digital distribution model. Say what you will about the ability to resell games or DRM or what have you, it is a compelling product.

It's generally best to leave features out, then only add them when it's determined to be necessary.

If they had that from the start and later decided to remove it, people would go insane.

They would have to hire the best of the best in order to implement something like that.

I suspect the outrage had more to do with signalling than the specific issue of pseudonyms.

I also suspect that signalling will become more important for web companies than most hardware companies, because I am more directly affected by what happens behind the scenes with web companies than say, a skateboard manufacturer. It's difficult to infer behind the scenes - what are they doing w/ my data, etc - without using some signals, like not allowing pseudonyms.

I imagine that startups face this most dramatically, because their product is so fragile and indefinite that signalling is used to forecast where things are headed before I invest significant time and money. This goes for all kinds of signalling - how likely are they to end the product, to lose funding and shut down, to dramatically increase prices, etc.

Is this true, or did most outraged (or just indifferent, but not excited) users really dislike the pseudonym policy itself?

I disliked the pseudonym policy itself, I found it to be a puzzling policy considering how immigrant-filled the tech industry is, and Google too.

I was born in a different country, with a different name. I operate with an anglicized name, which took years to become my legal name. There was a long period where the name everyone knew me as wasn't my legal one. Nowadays my legal name isn't the same name used by family members on a different continent.

Names are fluid, they're significant but ultimately just identifiers to tell us apart. I find the notion that there is a One True Name to be laughably geocentric and completely out of place in a social network (as opposed to say, the IRS).

For me the pseudonym policy was a minor annoyance, making me wonder just how culturally homogenous a team of product people have to be to cook it up. For others it has been much more damaging - trans people outed being probably the most memorable one, though not the only case where an idiotic policy has had unexpectedly severe consequences.

It puzzling also because in a tech company, surely there would have been a large number of people with experience from various communities who would know people primarily by a handle, and realise that in many sub-cultures people would be unable to connect with people they know very well if they were forced to use real names.

There are people who have known each other for decades that know each other by e.g. demo-scene handle only. In which case their real name has an anonymizing effect to the people they want to connect to online.

The SVP of Google who invented G+ used an anglicized pseudonym (approxinym?) from the start.

The pseudonym policy combined with Google's attempts to integrate G+ into every service they offer was a real threat to the safety of at-risk individuals. There was genuine outrage.

Removing the pseudonym policy and disentangling G+ from other services will both help protect people.

Boston Review published a series of essays on pseudonyms in May 2014, from Reed Hundt (former FCC chairman), with responders including Bruce Schneier, Richard M. Stallman, Jennifer Granick and Evgeny Morozov.

http://bostonreview.net/forum/reed-hundt-saving-privacy

Hopefully the light is being seen in more places and we can move onto designing infrastructure for large-scale use of pseudonyms.

"designing infrastructure for large-scale use of pseudonyms"

This doesn't require much design effort at all. It just requires not building an anti-pseudonym enforcement system.

(I'm not sure it was ever made clear how Google searched out and determined pseudonyms - reports from users? Statistical techniques on "improbable" names? If you used "John Smith" as a pseudonym how likely was it to be discovered?)

> Is this true, or did most outraged (or just indifferent, but not excited) users really dislike the pseudonym policy itself?

I actually nuked my G+ account explicitly because of their pseudonym policy. When they started allowing pseudonyms a couple years back, you had to 'apply' for permission to use one. I tried adding mine, and it was denied with zero explanation or recourse. "Fuck you, Google!" I exclaimed...then I realized I was getting upset over an account on a worthless me-too that was probably not long for this world. Calmed down, nuked account, nothing of value was lost.

There were people who lost accounts that were critical to their business because Google didn't believe that their unusual real name wasn't a pseudonym. They and the people they told this story to were outraged about the policy itself.

A significant portion of disgruntled users disliked the pseudonym policy itself, either due to its direct effect on them, or its indirect effect on them due to its effect on one or more of their friends.

I am so used to using a pseudonym for every site; I didn't even realize Goole plus didn't allow it. I disliked Google plus when they went into my Ipad and stole a profile picture. I still can't figure out how they did it. They didn't scrape it off the Internet; they went into a folder and stole it. I wish now I didn't delete it so fast. I tried to recover the picture for evidense, but to no avail.

>We know that our names policy has been unclear, and this has led to some unnecessarily difficult experiences for some of our users.

Was their names policy ever unclear, or are they pretending that this was all just a misunderstanding?

Yes, it was unclear. The appeals process was always pretty opaque, and it was never clear what qualified as an approvable name.

What is unclear about "REAL NAME"? Google wanted whatever is printed on your driver's license or birth certificate. Anything else was not OK.

(which was such an obviously idiotic policy that I hope to hear a candid explanation one day.)

Ignoring the ethical question of whether or not Google deserved to receive your legal name, and the ethical question of whether or not it should have forced said legal name onto you as a real name,

The policy was more than just "put in your real name lol". It was also about banning accounts that didn't have a real name, even where those names were legal. It was about an appeals process when you wanted to show that your name was legitimate even when the algorithm disagreed.

And these things were not clear.

Don't get me wrong; I've regularly defended G+ and I've used the service since being an early adopter and I find the claims that it's a "wreck" or a "ghost town" to be completely bunk. But the names policy was not clear. This isn't an ethical or philosophical question. This is just flat-out clarity. And it wasn't.

I don't quite understand.

> It was about an appeals process when you wanted to show that your name was legitimate even when the algorithm disagreed.

If you show your driver's license to Google, and they still don't accept it, then they are behaving irrationally. But their policy is clear as day.

> It was about an appeals process when you wanted to show that your name was legitimate even when the algorithm disagreed.

Again, it sounds like their algorithm was buggy and wrong. But it doesn't affect their presentation of their own policy.

Yes, it's unclear why they are pretending it was unclear :-)

And yet it still expects you to put in a first name and a last name. How very Anglocentric.

That's a whole other can of worms. :) At least mononyms are supported (by entering a '.' in the last name field).

Presumably the terms used are locale-dependent (G+ is pretty well localized)...

[and as noted in other comments, it allows mononyms as well, for everybody]

It's not just the Angles that do that. Eurocentric, maybe.

I had no problem with the "G+ uses real names" thing since I just viewed it as another option for Facebook that never really took off. I did have an issue with them forcing everything to use a G+ profile. I quit leaving reviews in the Play Store because of that. And not that I ever really commented on YouTube videos but once that change was forced, it never even crossed my mind to comment. I think they should have kept G+ as "real names" and split all the other stuff back away so they didn't require real names. But I do understand why people want to use other names. I just never used G+ like that.

I stopped engaging with Google properties when they changes the youtube comment system and broke it in Chrome. There's some setting about external sites or something that I could go in and change to make it work, but why should I? If they can't create a comment system that works with their own browser, and double posts everything to my g+ account I don't use, why should I bother?

It was like shoving peanuts down the throat of a person with a peanut allergy. No means no.

Funny how they make it sound like it was all planned, rather than "This was stupid idea that made many, who wanted to stay anonymous, avoid using G+". I remember when G+ launched and almost everyone was criticizing this idea - maybe they should listen to the majority of potential users and G+ wouldn't be such ghost-town?

> Funny how they make it sound like it was all planned

I didn't get that at all. It read to me like "we thought this was a good idea, we think it had some benefits, but we have realized that it was ultimately a bad idea and so we are reversing it"

But again, it would have been nice if the completely valid reasons why this was a knuckleheaded idea had been heeded from the get go. It was rammed through out of pure stubbornness and damaged the entire brand. I'm guessing, based on personal anecdotes, it probably hurt user engagement as well.

If I were to speculate, it has probably been in the works for months now. G+ changed leadership back in April, and the winds probably changed direction with it.

[1] http://bigstory.ap.org/article/googles-top-social-networking...

Longer.

Edited to add: Yonatan also mentions in a comment on the official post that "Vic was 100% involved in the process and approved the whole thing months ago." I can vouch that this is the truth.

Yonatan Zunger claims that Vic Gundotra approved the change.

I won't believe that unless Vic can prove it.

edit: I'm being downvoted, but remember that Vic is the one who pushed the names policy in the first place.

It's still possible to change your mind. Also, some things to consider: (a) Yonatan is the tech lead for G+. This is something he would be an authority on. (b) I also work for Google, have no particular reason to be loyal to Vic [I've opposed the names policy from the start], and I'm also willing to vouch that Vic approved it.

So if you still don't think that's enough to believe it, well, that's your prerogative, but I doubt anything is going to convince you in that case.

Vic has been particularly offensive about this. The restaurant analogy comes to mind. He also stonewalled for a long time, was kind of a dick about it, and refused to budge when presented with evidence. If something magically made him change his mind, I would love to know what it was.

That said, do you know what evidence made Vic push the names policy in the first place?

I don't think anything "magically" changed it - more just it evolved over time. See the quote from Yonatan I posted elsewhere in this thread regarding the original motivations and successes or lack thereof.

No idea on evidence question.

Surely there were discussions which lead to the names policy, as well as more discussions that lead to the repeal of it?

I have a hard time believing that a single person at Google (Vic) would be given so much free reign to make policy changes based on how it "felt" without having a shred of evidence. Unless I'm misunderstanding?

Total guess: Google wanted a world where Google could sell real, identifiable people to advertisers. Not enough real, identifiable people came to the restaurant.

At this point I doubt a name free-for-all is going to swell the occupancy.

It also comes after Vic Gundotra left Google. I do not know if that had to do with the decision.

It was planned, as far back as I can remember.

We understand that your identity on Google+ is important to you, and our Name Policy may not be for everyone at this time. We’d hate to see you go, but if you choose to leave, make a copy of your Google+ data first. Then click here to leave Google+. Oct 16, 2012 http://web.archive.org/web/20130311001441/http://support.goo...?

Now the handful of people who've been waiting on such a change to start using G+ can see be immediately disappointed with how half-assed it is.

I say this as someone with what seems to be an above average engagement with and opinion of G+.

Circles and communities are solid concepts that could work well, but the busted functionality for posting and commenting severely limits content and conversation.

Nobody, not even Google puts effort into G+ profiles. It's just another target for dumping links and hopefully driving some clicks back to your actual site/community.

Great, now my online friends can find me by the name they know me by, rather than my real-world name.

Or they could, if I hadn't deleted my G+ profile a year or two ago, in favour of just hanging out with them in the original venues I met them in.

I wanted to like Google+. Hell, I still want to like Google+. And it's still better than Facebook in some ways, IMO. But there are just a couple of nagging issues that are such big turn-offs that I can't stand visiting G+.

For one, the two-column stream layout is a steaming pile of shit with no rhyme or reason to the layout and selection of items you see. And the single-column layout wastes so much space with those huge empty spaces on either side of the stream, that it just about drives me batshit crazy.

Add in the fact that they have shown zero interest in giving the world a usable API, and no support for open standards (no RSS/Atom, no OpenSocial, no ActivityStrea.ms, no FOAF, etc.) and G+ - for me - falls so far short of its potential.

It makes me sad, as I was really hoping Google would come along and give us a truly awesome alternative to Facebook and they fumbled the ball.

For the single-column layout, https://userstyles.org/styles/87624 can help. (Though I get it - it's not a built-in thing, which reduces the value.)

Is there an opposite of "Streisand effect" ? If not then we might as well call it G+ effect.

Google took some unreasonable steps to make G+ popular that is precisely why I stopped using G+. After G+ I have not commented on any of the YoutTube videos. When Google started uploading every photo on my android device to Google+ and downloaded all PicasaWeb albums on my phone I switched to a fake Google id to be used on my phone. I now use Flikr instead of Picasaweb (now G+).

I now have around 6 fake Google Ids just to make sure Google+ does not put all my info in 1 place.

I am waiting for the day Google will make G+ Compulsory for using Chrome.

You can turn off the image upload. In fact, I believe you're asked if you want to enable it in the first place.

I was very early adopter. It was by default enabled. Yeah, we can turn off features but it is hard to explain how to do it to my father.

So they got to a meeting and said: "Listen guys, if allowing nick names won't jumpstart Google+ then I don't know what will. It's either this or we'll close the damn thing." 18 months from now, we'll read about the all-along-planned integration of G+ into Gmail, Drive or YouTube :P

I think it's the reverse: the main purpose of G+ was to integrate all the services together, being a Facebook competitor was just the icing. The integration wasn't a means, it was the end itself.

They haven't really lost since they still got what they needed out of it in the end: the majority of accounts have a unified profile across services, even though G+ the site is unused.

Definitely a mistake, they took a service that wasn't working (G+), integrated, and forced it on users for services that did work. I'm curious to see what happens, because it can't just be rolled back, and I think it's removing more value than it's creating.

You mean un-integration?

Were you looking for disintegration?

Disintegration! into pieces spread around gmail, drive and YT. That's probably what'll happen :)

EXTERMINATE. EXTERMINATE.

While a step in the right direction, Google's move to force real names AND the integration of G+ into their various services over the past few years has killed all of my goodwill towards anything Google. So, what I'm wondering is how does Google plan on rebuilding that lost goodwill? An apology is a nice gesture, but it doesn't make me trust the company. Nor does it fix any of the various screwed up UX issues due to the forced integration of G+ everywhere.

I have an anonymous identity on YouTube as well as a readily identifiable one on gmail and it's been ticking me off no end the way, it seems that, google is always trying to trick me into replacing the former with the latter on youtube.

Will this end now too?

The design tweak they did 2-3 weeks ago to the Account switcher on Youtube makes it readily apparent which Google account/gmail address the channel belongs to.

I haven't seen the "change your name" nag-dialog for some time. What bugs me the most is that I still can't comment on videos with the Youtube account event though google converted it to a Google+ account a long time ago, it's still useless.

Wow the whole post reads as if they planned it all along.

When it reality it seems like this is a last ditch attempt to save the wreck that google+ has become.

I almost never read posts on G+. Looking at this one reminds me why. Only 16 (16!) percent of the available area is devoted to the post content. On larger screens it would be worse. What a nightmare.

I find it much easier to read when the text is in columns of that width (like newspaper) than when it's full width. According to Wikipedia, it's actually recommended to put your content in columns of about 60 characters[1].

And it's not that narrow; facebook's newsfeed is about the same width as that post on my 23" monitor.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Column_%28typography%29#Typogra...

Heh, I use a custom Stylish rule for it to widen posts. https://userstyles.org/styles/87624/wider-posts-on-google-pl...

Bwahaha..

Okay, now which number do I call to get my account (moved _from_ my full name to 'Ben .' in protest during the nymwars) unblocked? I mean.. I'm not even sure I'd care at this point but are they even thinking of all the blocked users? Or do I need to send in my government issued ID to get my profile unblocked so that I can .. move away from my real name..??

Actually I just visited plus.google.com and surprisingly enough I wasn't greeted by the loop of death (previously I had a page that said that I'm blocked, with a link saying "You can check here why", which redirected to the very same page). Now I can "upgrade" and enroll. It seems.

I .. need to provide a first name and a last name though.. How does that compute? Why can't I be "Ben" or "Randomthingyhere"? Real names aren't required, but first and last names are?

Can't. Stop. Laughing.

You can be "Ben". https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1228271 Enter a '.' as the last name to use a mononym.

If you enter a '.' as your surname, will G+ omit this when displaying your name?

Yes. It will be rendered in G+ as a mononym.

If it does, then it does so inconsistently. For me it doesn't on the About page: https://plus.google.com/u/0/115709092170300569371/about

There was a bug uncovered as part of the launch today where some of them aren't rendering properly - there's a fix in the works; the dot should disappear when it goes live without any action on your part. (Don't know when it will go live yet.)

Note that your link doesn't appear to say anything about that. Might you be seeing an internal revision? (The current revision visible to the public appears to predate the policy change; perhaps a new version was meant to be pushed but has not been.)

I assume you missed the reference. Below troubleshooting it lists "You only have one name" and explains this amazing solution there.

That was already present on this page when I first visited the link yesterday.

You're absolutely right, I failed to read closely enough.

Please. I laughed so hard it hurt just now.

First of all, thanks a lot. So that'd be the way to sign up as "Ben".

Now please revisit my original post. Did you notice what my name was, before the profile got blocked? I'll post it again. It was "Ben .".

Now this hotel bar has to help me forget this link of yours as soon as possible or I'll shake my head until it falls off..

So this seems like a first concrete sign of a change in direction since Vic's moving on. After arguing passionately against their real name policy for so long it feels strange now that they have actually done it. On the one hand it's a hopeful sign, but on the other hand it reminds me of companies that open source their products only after they decided it failed. Is this a sign Google is positively steering G+ in a new direction or have they just given up and decided now they don't care any more they should just off load the bad PR of the real name policy? At least now I might start reviewing and rating Android apps again now that my real name isn't going to be publicly displayed to the developer.

FWIW, this policy change was in the works long before Vic left (and Vic was the one who initially approved it). G+ hasn't been given up on.

Interesting info, thanks! And good to know. I like G+ and I don't want Google to give up on it.

what is the fuss about? My version of "Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov" (translation: "John J Johnson") was ok on Facebook, Google+, etc... yesterday, ok today and will be ok tomorrow :)

I have never used my real name on Internet except for the LinkedIn (where obviously i have nothing that can be construed as an opinion of any sort :) and cases where i had to enter my CC/bank info.

Ability to maintain several identities is the gift of the Internet, an additional virtual dimension added to our lives. Why wouldn't we explore it? Why voluntarily confine ourselves to the plain boring and sterile world of "real name policy" places like FB?

Facebook is asking for official ID for new accounts in some places.

I have had to change my Facebook name also. "We see you're not using your real name".

I just changed it to a real sounding name that is also not my real name.

What does this really change? I mean seriously. Google is the company that lets you "turn off web history", and then goes ahead and tracks it anyway. Do you have Do Not Track enabled in Chrome? Tough luck. It's just for show there, because Google doesn't respect it.

So how am I to believe that using a different name and e-mail address on Google+, Google won't know I'm the same person, because of all of their tracking from Chrome, Youtube, search, and so on?

And if they do that, then how is this any different than using an "alias" right now on Google+? This seems more like a PR move from Google.

If you're worried Google is tracking you through chrome, you might consider switching to a more privacy centric browser you can trust, like Firefox.

My favorite part, is when they tried to sell us the idea that the real name enforcement was the best improvement that could happen to youtube.

I would had preferred a sincere apology for screwing things up, was it really hard to admit failure??? Even Microsoft has apologized for previous failues like Windows 8 and Internet Explorer!!!

But anyway... with this announcement Google+, and in general, any Google-owned public website like Youtube has lost any credibility to me.

I need to apologize to people who said that G+ was shoved at us. I successfully avoided any forced association of my G+ account with my YT account for a long time, and I said it wasn't being forced on us. Until somehow somewhere something happened and they became linked, and I'm afraid to mess with it any more lest I find them even more merged into leviathan.

I once even got a product manager apologize for the woefully substandard test automation tools built into Visual Studio. Perhaps my finest hour.

The people who work at Microsoft are just regular humans, too, you know. Why does it make you so gleeful to hear this?

Because, unlike the other 99.99% of tech companies, they acknowledge publicly the frustration they have caused with the issues of their product.

The least I want is a company that claims everything they do is perfect, and pretends nothing is wrong.

I wonder if this was done to appease the existing YouTube users that refused connect the account to a Google+ account with their real name.

Anybody who was already on Google+ didn't mind the real-name policy, but they certainly weren't going to tell millions of YouTube people "Sorry we don't have a place for you anymore."

I am still skeptical that many YouTube members will create Google+ profiles as a result of this.

Forcing me to use my real name on Youtube, will just prevent me from ever commenting on a video.

"Anybody who was already on Google+ didn't mind the real-name policy"

...because those that did didn't join up in the first place. Nymwars.

Both of those statements are untrue. The nymwars took place on Google Plus as much as they did anywhere else.

They finally forced my G+ identity to be primary on my YouTube account a few weeks ago, despite me trying for years for it not to happen.

You can undo that.

How?

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2657858?hl=en

That link says it will only work for accounts connected within the last fourteen days.

I find this whole thing really off putting.

First they force my youtube account over to Google+.

The a few months down the track say - 'whoops, sorry about that - but you cant have your old account back'

And why? Why should he (she?) undo something done by G+?

Man, this is way too late. Definitely feel bad for Google about Google+.

yes - it must be a harrowing time for sergey and brin

I still like G+ but this comes a little too late

Great, now I can use my secret identity there. Admittedly, pretty much anything is effectively secret when I use G+.

Google still won't allow their users to use the url name as my nickname

for example, my email is guest666@gmail.com, i want to use url plus.google.com/+guest666, but google won't allow me to do that, even when guest666 is available to be claim. They force me to use +(my name)

That was the final blow to me. That day I removed G+ account from Google Apps mail. It is just stupid.

1. My name is "Firstname Lastname".

2. I've checked and for plus.google.com/+<URL>, both "FirstName" and "LastName" aren't used by anyone. Hell, even "FirstnameLastname" is not taken, or even the part of my first name which is my nickname let's call it "First" is free.

3. But Google wants me to have a stupid URL like plus.google.com/+FirstnameLastname<some stupid characters or numbers here>, just because some algorithm thinks "a lot of people might want that name".

Well, then fuck you Google!

IMHO they just want to shut-down G+ with little grace or sth.

What's even worse when you have business. We have a pretty long and unique name, yet they only offered companynamede or something like that.

I wrote this submission, notice I emphasized the irony: http://slashdot.org/submission/1778830/google-is-gagging-use...

And for the record, I don't like real name policies but I also don't like it when people have to use throwaways or pseudonyms either. For example, I still remember this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7809766

I want to be able to change my Google+ name to a nickname, not showing my real name at all. And I want my gmail email to still come from my real name. As far as I can tell, there is no way to do that.

And once again they miss the point that so many of us never touched google plus over.

The name thing was a big deal for many, but for far more was the banning itself.

Getting banned on google plus for whatever google decides on a whim is against its terms of use that day (e.g. stupid name policy) will also nuke your gmail.

Far too many people were dependent on a free service with zero guarantees back then, many still are - there is just no reason to risk losing your gmail over cat updates when facebook is completely separate.

False. In the past, if your profile was suspended (for example, because of your name), it only affected your Google+ profile. Your Gmail still worked exactly the same.

Some people spread rumours in the early days of Google+ that your Gmail would be shut down if your Google+ was suspended, but that was never the case.

I recall the suspension thing being the whole reason the name thing came to light, perhaps I am mistaken?

Edit: Seems you are correct:

> Horowitz also took time to dispel the rumor that a suspension of a Google+ account means that a user loses his or her access to Gmail, Google Docs or other Google services. "When an account is suspended for violating the Google+ common name standards, access to Gmail or other products that don’t require a Google+ profile are not removed," he said.

http://mashable.com/2011/07/25/google-plus-common-names/

Except there were a shitload of reports of it happening anyway.

I believe that in the early days, one or two people had their whole account shut down and went around complaining that it was because of Google+'s name policy when really it was because of something completely unrelated (distributing illegal content from their account, I think). The rumours spread from their, making it seem like it was happening to a lot of people, when it really never happened at all.

> but it also excluded a number of people who wanted to be part of it without using their real names.

And people who didn't mind using their real names but were worried that Google won't think they're real enough and block their access to all services they used for years. They failed hard on that one, but now it's not even mentioned anymore. I'm slightly disappointed they just want to sweep that under the rug...

Maye they finally reached a critical mass in their social graph of real people that it might be possible to match the anonymous, active people.

I won't say that having my name keeps me from saying stupid things, but I do tone it down and work towards more positive posts because of it. Just like I try to do here (and often fail due to a huge, yet stupid, ego). I think everyone should have a choice but I encourage everyone to use their real name.

I'm not interested in using a web service that "lets" me do things I can already do without it.

> We know that our names policy has been unclear

No, Google, your names policy was never unclear, it was crystal clear and also completely moronic.

Glad to see you finally see the light, even if you won't acknowledge that you're simply correcting a mistake that everybody else but you saw.

ah the final act before G+ is shut down in favor of G++

Next step, remove G+ from Youtube. More specifically, use G+ for authentication but bring back Youtube accounts. Alternatively maybe add a site/application specific alias option to G+.

I don't want to have 2 G+ accounts (like I have now) for no real reason.

I refuse to become emotionally invested in G+ because Google is infamous for shutting down products that aren't used by the majority of its users. Reading all the negative comments from this post reaffirms my decision.

Twitter = Perceptions,

Facebook = People,

Google+ = Passions.

Each have their respective place. I like G+ and I actually get quite a lot out of it. It took some real time investment to fully appreciate it. I hope it doesn't go the way of the dodo or reader though.

Ah, they finally realized that there are non-trollish cases where people want to express a thought online without having it indexed and searchable by everyone they ever meet in life.

Or they just want to compete with facebook...

Just as the NSTIC was defunded, Google changes it's real name policy.

Happy #nymwars anniversary, Google!

Finally.

I'm actually really starting to like g+ .. Took me a while but it far superior to any other social network.. The problem for me is still trusting google with that much Data.

Thank you, no. My account is going to remain deactivated.

Why bother, it will be shut down by years end anyway.

This wouldn't have been that bad if they didn't accept obviously fake names such as 'agu monkey'.

Really? Diaspora* did that from the start.

Thanks for leading the way here, Google.

If leading the way is making a bad decision that has a huge public backlash, sticking with it for 3 years while the service languishes, and then reversing it in a last ditch effort to save face... I really hope no one else follows.

Woosh, that's the sound of sarcasm flying past you.

This will be a great feature for 2011!

So Google+ wants to pivot to become MySpace? The only problem their G+ brand is weak and uncool.

Just changed my name to Northern Lights. They still pissed and whined when I tried.

"We shoved this product up your ass real hard, but we still failed to compete with Facebook. Today, we are taking the last step: allowing you to choose any name you want. We hope to gain a little bit of Internet karma with this before we become irrelevant."

Wow. That's a lot of comments being unhappy about the change.

Yeah, and I find it funny how many people equated to the policy change being a harbinger of an onslaught of trolling.

Meanwhile I have at least three Google profiles, all with obvious (to me) fake names that I've used for a long time, since G+ ever asked me to merge my Google Mail with them.

I think they're latching onto the wrong aspect of social networks, identity, and such in their complaints.

The real issues are that there's no signifier for "verified" individuals (like on Amazon, maybe by way of Google Wallet?) and no way to limit +1s or comments to such users. I think that's the only way to really impose the feeling of non-anonymity on a user's comment or whatnot.

Also, some of the complainers are just idiots who don't understand how to use circles to restrict interactions or comments on their content... which sucks because I actually dig Google's model there.

That surprised me as well. Of course we are HN but I really didn't think anybody except Google wanted this.

Too little, too late.

Backpedaling is the name of the game...

Awesome changes, just 3 years too late.

so YouTube comments are back?

Whatever.

I don't know about you, but I have no problem using my real name. Anywhere.

Good for you. This isn’t about you, then. The people who it is about are listed here:

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Rea...

Not only those. I don't want to use my real name ever and I'm definitely not on that list. I just want to be anonymous and be able to write whatever I want without it harming my real persona.

On the flip side, I don't want to be anonymous, I want my achievements tied to my real persona --- but my real persona is "Shish" (with no surname), and G+ didn't allow that... (And apparently it still doesn't -- despite the policy change, "surname" is still a required field)

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