Thoughts on Google’s “Namegate”
I started using Google+ shortly after it was open to beta invites. This was a good month at least before the public at large was allowed to join.
As I was signing up and reading their Terms of Service, I came across this little gem, which has become an unbelievable source of drama in the internet community – The “Real Name Policy”.
The policy is outlined in section 13 of the company’s User Content and Conduct Policy. It’s designed to stop users from creating fake profiles and to set a positive tone. Section 13 read as follows:
To help fight spam and prevent fake profiles, use the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you. For example, if your full legal name is Charles Jones Jr. but you normally use Chuck Jones or Junior Jones, either of those would be acceptable.
Sounded fair enough to me. It is Google’s party, after all. And yes, I said I read the ToS!
One of the things I hear a lot from people – my students in particular – when they tell me they “hate” a place they had been a member of online and got their account suspended – is that they believe they did not do anything wrong. This is quite a common occurrence with my WoW players.
The problem is after asking if they actually bothered to read the site’s Terms of Service, they said no. This is a big thing a lot of people still do not understand. While there are a lot of free services out there, they often have rules. It is no different than it was back in the old days, when you had to sign a contract. You were supposed to read it – not just jump in with both feet.
tl;dr version: Read the Terms of Service, Privacy Policy or anything you plan to use online. You never know if you might violate the rules – and companies do not often restore accounts based on “Oh, I did not know that.” Despite what you may have heard in the past, ignorance is no an excuse, especially when a lot of places have a checkbox field asking registering users if they agree to the site’s terms.
So, what happened was this: A lot of people didn’t read the ToS but agreed to it, and then signed up for a Google+ account under a pseudonym.
So what did Google do? They started deleting accounts for violating the service’s “real name” policy. You know… like they said that they would.
That led to some absolutely hilarious complaints around the internet.
I go by the nickname Lord Blizzard everywhere on the Web. I got this nickname since I was a kid, all my friends are calling me this way, many people know me exclusively by this name not knowing the real one (and I’d prefer it stayed this way). Even my brother and my parents know it and sometimes call me this way for the laughs. What problem do you have with that?
SO GOOGLE PREJUDICE AND BIAS IS STILL RIFE…. WHAT IS WRONG WITH MY NAME? IT IS THE ONLY ONE I HAVE. WHY HAVE YOU SUSPENDED MY PROFILE? I AM USING MY REAL NAME, MY LEGAL NAME…WHAT’S YOUR PROBLEM? (this one from mrgoldfinder)
My real name is “Vĩnh Cửu Trần”. I come from Viet Nam. In Vietnamese, “Vĩnh Cửu” has the same meaning as “Forever”. So I set “Forever Trần” as my name in Google Profile and I think nothing wrong with that!
My name is Emory LaserWolf. That is my name. It is the name everyone in the real world knows me by. I even gave Google my old name in my aka, because I trusted them. Google doesn’t know me. They don’t tell me what my name is. Did they ask me about my name? Did they learn how important it is to me, and how real it is, and how it is representative of my relationship to my wife, who I have been with for 13 years? No. They dismissed me. I am sad.
I could go on and on with these… but I think you get the idea. People didn’t read the ToS and then suddenly get all offended when they pay the price for it.
Now, on the other hand – there is a difference between those who got kicked out of Google+ and those who are afraid to start using it because of privacy issues.
Jillian York is the director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She says the policy was enacted to encourage people to be more responsible with what they post since it will be associated with their actual name instead of some made up online name. But, says York, the policy has wider implications: “Obviously there’s the famous folks who use pen names, but then you also have people whose spouses who works for the government who are not allowed to blog about their own personal life. Or you have someone from a small town, who is gay, lesbian, not out in their community and doesn’t feel safe. I heard of an example of a woman who works at Walmart in rural Tennessee, uses a pseudonym online because she’s worried she could get fired from her job.”
Beyond that, there are political dissidents, people in abusive relationships, people who have strong reasons for not wanting to be found online but wish to use the service. As for Google, says York, “I think they’re well aware of those situations. Their own employee was using a pseudonym on Facebook during the Egyptian revolution. There are two minds on this: on one hand, I heard a Google engineer say they worry they can’t protect those people and don’t think it’s their job to protect them. On the other hand, they have said they feel the use of real names creates a more civil environment. To that, I would politely disagree. The worst harassment I’ve had is from people using real names.”
And with this, I agree.
There are some (maybe a lot) of people out there who do not want to use their real names. I’m not talking about some Second Life user who thinks that his real name is Opensource Obscure… I’m talking about people like these:
- The rape survivor who wants to be able to take about her experiences but not letting people who whom she really is to protect her privacy. http://mg.co.za/article/2011-0…
- The closeted gay teenage boy who wants to participate in the online gay community where he can find support and friendship without the homophobic bullies at his high school finding out and driving him to suicide. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
- The average small-town worker who just happens to be an atheist but would get fired from their job if their boss found out. http://mattcbr.wordpress.com/2…
- Or fired for being Democrat when your boss is Republican http://www.missourinet.com/201… or vice versa http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/pol… .
Those people deserve the opportunity to protect themselves.
Sure – the argument can be reasonably made that if they don’t like the policy – they don’t need to use the service. There are a shiteload of alternative social media platforms out there.
But this is Google. The “Don’t Be Evil” folks. And like Rachel Whetstone, Google Vice President of Global Communications & Public Affairs said not but two years ago:
We have a bias in favor of people’s right to free expression in everything we do. We are driven by a belief that more information generally means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual. We believe that it is important for free expression that people have the right to remain anonymous if they choose.
Kinda makes you think.
It is true, there are some hilarious complaints around the internet.
There are also complaints from people who, by most reasonable interpretations, were following the rules. As the rule is written, if the majority of people in your real life call you by a name, regardless of how funny it looks or anything else, according to the policy as written, you should be allowed to use it. This is not, as it turns out, how Google is enforcing the policy. They are pretty much refusing to even comment on that, and there is evidence that they are also telling their dissenting employees not to talk about it, either.
Google is very good at writing their terms of service and other rules in plain, colloquial, reasonable-sounding English. That doesn’t mean they’re actually being reasonable.
You sort of addressed this, but I wanted to reiterate, it’s important to consider WHY Google is being so unwavering on this issue. They have plenty of justifications, but they’re not backed up particularly by logic or evidence. Since, you know, they are a company, who’s looking to make money, above all else, probably the real reasons have to do with money. It’s not hard to see why having people’s legal names, or something that can be matched to a legal name easily, is an advantage, when the way you make money is targeted advertising. Is this something we’re happy with? (Obviously I’m not the first to say any of this. There’s really not much new to be said on this topic, unless Google does something meaningful.)