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

[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.