A Google+ Road Bump: Real Names

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I'm sure you remember the giddy early response to Google+. Why wouldn't you remember, it was only 2 weeks ago. There was a lot of joy over Circles!, Hangouts!, and Privacy! There were dozens of tips for how to do this and how to do that with Google+.

And then there was the real name policy.

Giddiness faded fast among those who are generally known by a pseudonym or who wish to remain anonymous for security reasons.

The announced policy on Google+ was that users had to create accounts using their real names. Butting heads with that policy resulted in suspension from Google+. Google has reinstated many people it suspended, but the issue over real names has expanded into a wide-ranging discourse on privacy and anonymity on the Internet.

In the beginning there was Skud

The first case I heard about involved Skud. When Skud, a former Google employee, announced on her blog that she'd been suspended from Google+ it captured the attention of many people in tech who know of Skud as Skud. Just Skud. Her blog post details the process Google had in place to request reinstatement, and the response Skud got from the process. Skud points out the phrase in the Google+ terms of service saying, "To help fight spam and prevent fake profiles, use the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you."

Skud has another post on her blog called My Name that goes into detail about all the places she's worked (including Google) where everyone referred to her as Skud, conferences she's spoken at where she was introduced as Skud, and on and on. In effect, proving that she did, "use the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you."

In her follow up post dated July 24, 2011, Skud widened the discussion around real names, but also pointed out,

As far as I know, people are not losing access to all their Google services simply for using a name that Google doesn’t like. I have not yet heard of a single documentable case of this.

Skud created a survey for people to had been suspended. She has published some preliminary results of her survey.

Other Google+ Suspensions

Jillian York writes in "Google+ and Real Names",

Today, I spotted my first example of Google+ cracking down on a user for violating this particular rule. Ken Wehr, who publicly posted about his experience on Google+, found his account disabled for initially using his initials (“k s w”) to identify himself.

Jillian further mentioned,

I respect that people who use known “handles” across multiple services might wish to do so on Google+ as well.

Even Limor Fried was suspended. Here's her post announcing I am back.

BlogHer's own A.V. Flox was suspended.

A.V. has been reinstated, and posted this early this morning. It's a comment from Google:

Nyms, names by which you're known in your community, are names which your friends usually call you and so are explicitly OK under this policy... The implementation has not gone as smoothly as I think it should have – too many accounts were suspended pending investigation (although they should be getting reinstated, too) – but we're still working out the kinks, here. This was never going to be a simple thing to implement.

On Skepchick, the headline in a post by Bug Girl read Does Google+ Hate Women?. Bug Girl talked about safety and the reasons for anonymity. She linked to a post on the Geek Feminism Wiki called Who is Harmed by a "Real Names" policy?, and commented,

That page goes on to list, in detail, the various ways that these groups can be harmed. We know that women experience 25 TIMES the amount of harassment online that men do. We know that 50% of LGBT teens are bullied online, and many of them consider–or commit–suicide. We know that women are stalked and killed by ex-lovers. We know that LGBT folk are the victims of hate crimes.

Suw Charman-Anderson wrote about the safety issue, names