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

Comments

[mmcirvin]

I *think* the phenomenon of getting locked out of GMail was something they quashed pretty quickly (though it's always the case that you can't trust cloud storage somebody else can lock you out of, which is basically all of it). I saw at least one reference to that being changed.

To me, the thing about mixed writing systems as indicator of fakeness is the most obviously broken bit. Especially considering how young Chinese and Chinese-American people approach informal names.

[mmcirvin]

Also, I didn't realize until just now that they had to be prodded to make gender private; this indicates that they did not pay any attention to how this played out on LiveJournal in the very recent past.

This is all free ice cream, of course, and it's not as if they owe us anything. But if they want to be the non-evil alternative to Facebook they have to think abou this stuff.

[hrafn]

Yeah, it simply blows my mind that they're all "Here are these awesome Circles to make it easier to keep information within certain layers of privacy" and yet they started out forcing gender to be public. Did no one research how other social media-type places do these things?? And what the downside is of having gender public?

[ext_52839]

You can send feedback to the Google Plus folks by going there, clicking the gear icon at the top of the page, choosing the "Send feedback" item, and then filling in the little form. The relevant folks are more likely to see it there than here.

[mmcirvin]

They've already heard all of this stuff. It wouldn't, on the other hand, hurt to speak up to show the base of support, that it isn't just some troublemakers who want to be pseudonymous because they're up to no good.

[tahnan]

Wow. That was so thoroughly an unintuitive place to look for the "feedback" link that when I went to the page after only kind of reading this comment, I failed to find it at all and closed the page. Thanks, Google.

[tahnan]

....oh, wait, no, correction to my previous comment.

Maybe that works if you're already a member. But for me, when I click the gear and choose "Send Feedback", I get sent to a page telling me that I can send feedback by going to Google+ and choosing the "send feedback" link at the bottom. Which I don't have, because I'm not signed into Google+.

It's as if they somehow don't want to hear from us.

[mmcirvin]

...Incidentally (sorry to keep prattling on; I'm sleep-deprived and punchy) LiveJournal has not been without its problems, and there have been times I thought about bolting

[prog]

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]

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.