Google+-

[prog]

As mmcirvin and hrafn note in comments on my previous post, Google has been acting capriciously about perceived TOS violations involving names. If they happen to see a name they find fishy -- or that fails a regex, or that gets tattled on by another user -- they immediately lock that user out of their account with no way to get at their data until Google wills them back in.

(I'm alarmed to wonder how deep this lockout goes, thinking of the case of this 10-year-old who permanently lost access to all his Gmail after filling in a Google+ sign-up form with his honest age -- to the shock of his parents, who approved of his joining them online. But I expect there'd be an even louder freakout if lots of people were losing their email archives en masse, so I read this as a tangential issue.)

Weak-willed and prone to distraction, I'm not the sort to leave a service I'm enjoying in protest (at least not very quickly). But I find the argument that real-name use is a privilege of those with privilege both novel and compelling, and Google's position against it troubling. It also makes me belatedly realize that Google's celebrated decision to let Plus users make their "Gender" field private is less helpful to those whose truenames -- which, according to Google, they are required to use and make public -- signify their gender.

Bleh. We'll see. I really am going to have egg on my face if I end up disgusted with Google+; this'll be the Nth stupid social thing I've allowed myself to flip out over and spam my friends about, only to wonder weeks later where all the shiny went. The only social networks I haven't felt this way over are Twitter and LiveJournal, and I note that in both cases I very gradually figured out why they were cool and how they could work for me.

Comments

[jadelennox]

The funny thing is, as paranoid as I am in general about big companies, I was totally set to jump on this bandwagon until the real names thing fell out. I have lots of reasons not to want my real name associated with me in a big service like that, and only a few of them have to do with the big political issues that the Geek Feminism post gets at so well. A lot of them are simply about not wanting to engage with people who are more likely to find me on a large service. I think it's a very poor decision,and the actions they've taken around the policy have been dealt with incredibly scummily.

that xkcd comic is more true than we ever thought when it came out. It's just another Facebook alternative, albeit with apparently a better user interface.


(also, the anti-pseudonym people are always raving that allowing throwaway and pseudonymous accounts will turn any system into 4chan. Which explains why I spend all my time on LJ and DW running from the /b/ folks, I guess? There is nothing inherent about throwaway and pseudonymous accounts that turns people into douchebags on the Internet; plenty of people are willing to be dbags under their real name and plenty of services that allow pseudonymity work just damn fine.)

[prog.livejournal.com]

Agreed, but I wish to add that I'm still willing to hold out the benefit of the doubt for them. The reason there was more applause than jeering about the gender-field thing was that they did in fact react with relative speed to users' well-stated concerns. It really was nice to see that they're listening and willing to be flexible.

The truename requirement, since its tied into the way that G+ ties itself into the rest of the web, is a far bigger deal than a single account data-field. I can understand it taking far more effort to reverse, not just technologically but policy-wise, and I can also understand Google not saying a word about any internal discussion they're having about it until they come to a decision -- or even until they implement and release a relevant update.

...or they could be just waiting to see if it'll just blow over. Or something in between, where the rule stays on the books but they stop practically enforcing it (hi Facebook). Cannot know yet, can only keep making noise until then.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Some of the worst actors in the RaceFail debacle that overtook science-fiction fandom in 2009 were vehement opponents of pseudonymity whose primary attack was to reveal or threaten to reveal the identities of pseudonymous people, in retaliation for being accused of cluelessness on racial issues.