A brief thought on why Google are insisting on real names

[andrewducker]

I don't actually think this is an evilness thing. I think they've noticed that Facebook is the only social site used by _everyone_ and is also the only site which insists on real names*. Therefore, they believe, that the only way to get non-geeks to use a social networking site is to make it about real people, using their real names.

After all, my father isn't going to add FluffyHairedGoth72, but he will add Andrew Ducker. So if Google want him on their service then they will have to make me use my real name**.

*Yes, I know lots of people use fake names, that's not really the point.
**Yes, I use my real name anyway, but I'm decidedly unusual in that respect.

Comments

[matgb]

Yeah but no but yeah...

That was Facebook's rules. But they changed them after a fair bit of pressure, but they did so vewwy vewwy kwietly.

And because people didn't already have a strong attachment to the brand/company, they could choose to simply not use Facebook.

Plus, Facebook suspended and handled it a bit better (I forget the details, but they did once suspend an MP for impersonating himself, but dealt with it quickly).

Most of the fuss is because Google are handling this incredibly badly, and have a rep and promise to not do so.

[matgb]

In reply to our discussion on LJ as LJ is down.
Francis Davey: Google's name policy is not illegal

"a service consisting in, or having as its principal feature, the conveyance by means of an electronic communications network of signals, except in so far as it is a content service".

G+ is definitely a communications network, and it definitely makes use of such to convey signals.

The question is whether that's supposed to mean that the service ir providing the network, which isn't clear. However, while your barrister link thinks it doesn't, Jay says the information commissioner thinks it does and is investigating.

Regardless, I think there's a case under equalities law anyway, transitioning transgendered people would find this policy very difficult even if no one at all was nasty to them about it.

[andrewducker]

Transitioning transgendered would tend to have a name, and then have a different name.

They may well have a problem at some point because they have one name with one group of people and one group with a different group of people, I give you. Certainly that was the case with the couple of people I know who have transitioned, although it was a shortlived period of time.

But in that case, having two G+ accounts, one with each name, would seem to be the obvious solution.

[naath]

Many people will pick their new name and begin using it in sympathetic online spaces long before being out to their family and colleagues in the real world. Of course such names are unlikely to fall foul of google's "real" name policy - "Mary Smith" looks no stranger to their algorithm than "John Smith".

[emceeaich]

jamoche has the proper reply to that argument here: http://jamoche.dreamwidth.org/6623.html

[birguslatro]

My take on it is they're after the 'internet passport' market. (For want of a better term.) They idea being to be top dog in trusted IDs. Imagine a world where a lot of sites won't deal with you except through Google+.

[andrewducker]

Not gonna happen. No service has managed enough penetration to make it possible to use it as the only login for mass-market services.

I hope that something like the Verified Email Protocol takes off.

[jack]

Hm. To me it always seemed obvious that facebook tapped into some effect with the "act like physical people" policy, apparently that many people (if obviously not everyone) had a subset of stuff they were happy to share with people they knew by name and enjoyed having somewhere to put it.

Now, if that exists, that's obviously a cultural thing -- we could have a culture where everyone has a stripped-down work-appropriate dreamwidth account under their real name, and another with an online handle (even if you can find one from the other) but we don't, and it's something people -- apparently -- want to have.

To me the question was "is that worth the downsides of most people using their real names" (maybe) and "is that worth the massive privacy violations of companies that repeatedly change policies non-transparantly to ensure that you can't reliably treat anything on the site as private, regardless of settings" (probably not).

But now, many people think that the real name thing is just stupid -- not implementedly badly and abusively, but that the only reason anyone would want it at all is that they're evil. And I don't know if I'm completely blind or what.

[andrewducker]

What percentage of GooglePlus members do you think "many people" are?

[jack]

I've no idea. My instinctive feeling was like 90%+ of people on facebook (ie. everyone who isn't devoted to some more geeky social networking protocol) but as I say, that was just a guess, everyone else seems to feel its close to zero, and I certainly have no evidence, just that that was my prior assumption.

[andrewducker]

I'm confused - you're saying that 90% of people want to use pseudonyms? That seems...unlikely to me.

[jack]

Oops, sorry, I was referring the wrong bit of my post, I thoguht you were asking about "many people ... had a subset of stuff they were happy to share with people they knew by name and enjoyed having somewhere to put it" not "many people think that the real name thing is just stupid".

For the latter, I don't know -- it's an impression based on what people say about Google+ and what posts (like this one) seem to be responding to other people saying... It seems a widespread perception amongst people I know who are vocal about it, but I don't know how many that is.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I don't know either. I'd like to hope that Google do - but that may be me being naive.

[jack]

Yeah. I honestly expected them to not fuck this up. I mean, they've had definite problems with privacy, but they have seemed to make an effort to fix problems when they've occurred. I didn't think "like facebook, but not sucky at privacy" was that hard! But apparently they didn't see "making the same mistakes as facebook" as a potential train wreck.

I mean, (whether or not I agree) I understand why they may want "real names, more or less". But I don't understand why they didn't get some decent policies set out in advance for what counted -- that's hard, but getting "good enough" AI used to be what they did well. I guess it leaves them unprepared when it isn't good enough and they have to talk to actual people and aren't ready.

[andrewducker]

Yeah - they don't seem to have actually thought about names beyond "We'd like people to use their real ones", which is what's causing their problem now. If they'd said "We want the name your date of birth/driving license/etc" from the beginning, and got their appeals process right then they'd have been better off (although some people will never be happy with that)

[jack]

Yeah. I mean, I think they do need to go by common usage, even in Anglophone countries (even facebook lets you do that).

But even a trivial appeals process before unilatarily cancelling people's accounts would have done wonders. If you send a message saying "Is this your legal/common use name? If so, please confirm below" may have caught most cases. And if everyone in USA uses real names and everyone in HK can get away with using pseudonyms, because it's harder for google to detect, so what? Surely that's enoguh of a network effect already?

[andrewducker]

Setting up the network so that the norm is people's real name is a good start. That way people won't defect unless they really don't want to share their real names.

I think what Google wants to avoid is the norm to be odd user names like CartesianDaemon or ObsceneNickname, because the average person has no interest in engaging in that manner, and they believe it will put people off.

[naath]

The thing is that Google *aren't* insisting on the-name-on-your-passport (I seriously object to the notion that that name is my one-and-only REAL name); they have not implemented any way of checking that "John Smith"'s passport says "John Smith" and not "Alice Jones" . Whilst the stated policy is that you must use your "real" name there is no enforcement; being pseudonymous on G+ is easy, the hard part is if your usual pseudonym is "FluffyHairedGoth72" that you can't use that on G+ so you can't rely on anyone finding you (unless you explicitly contact them to tell them), which is a problem you have regardless of whether you use your "real" name or one you made up yesterday.

They are insisting on everyone using what Google have determined are "acceptable" "real" names. And that, I'm afraid, is a totally different kettle of fish. A policy that says I can be "John Smith" but not "Mary Jane O'Neil" (punctuation, space in the first name) or "Robert Chan" (mixed language) or anything with accented or otherwise non-ASCII characters is... well, I think it's discriminatory against everyone who comes from a culture other than really fairly narrow one with naming conventions that fit into Google's rules. And of course there is no law preventing me from changing the name on my passport to or naming my (hypothetical) child "FluffyHairedGoth72" (it is dreadfully inconvenient in the UK to have only one name, and I'm sure employers would look askance; but I COULD do it).

[andrewducker]

Oh, absolutely. They've shot themselves in the foot with the way they've done it.

What they should have done is set norms, made it clear that the majority of people would be using real names, and let that push the vast majority of people in the direction of real name usage.

It's to keep the geeks out.

[http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pete/id/config.php]

If you want to start a mass market social network then you need to make sure that when someone 'normal' joins they aren't overrun with weird freaks who write lengthy things about sex/technology etc. and instead can only find the people who want to share photos of children/cats. Setting it up so that everyone who actually reads the terms of service or uses a pseudonym sods off in a huff is a useful way of achieving that goal.