It all comes down to what is considered to be an ‘authentic’ name. If, for example, you’re a member of the Screen Actor’s Guild, you probably never use your given name – as the SAG requires names on its rolls to be unique, and never used before. Thus if you have the same name as anyone previously on its rolls, you’ve no recourse but to register with the SAG under another and use it for all related activities.
Names being what they are, virtually nobody you see in the cast, crew or credits of a film are using the names they were born with. Many people increasingly use public profiles online, never leaving online traces of or using their private identity at all.
However, using a nickname, nom de plume, stage-name, professional name, or performance name might not be good enough for Google+. Google+ really seems to want your original name. The one that maybe hardly anyone actually knows you by.
I keep my own name under my hat. Quite honestly, I don’t even really use it that often. It gets pretty dusty in the meantime. Tateru Nino is the name I’ve been known by to my clients, co-workers, and employers for some years now – and even around the house at times.
In actual fact, if I were faced with the names on the driving licenses of those co-workers, clients and employers, I probably would recognise very few of them. I didn’t know them by those names. Most people that I worked with went by some other name in the normal course of things, and some – well, I’m just not sure about…. because, you know… it doesn’t matter.
It really doesn’t, because I know everything about these people that I think is important to know.
Opensource Obscure is a familiar name to many of you. You’ve seen his comments here (or elsewhere), agreed with him, argued with him, maybe thought he was a good sort, or thought he was a bit of a dick. You might be a reader of his Italian Second Life blog. You may have done business with him. In your mind he has a reputation, for good or ill.
You likely don’t know him under any other name and you might not have any interest in any other name that he has. If he were to use it, you wouldn’t recognise it, because it has no association with the identity that you’ve come to know over the years.
In other words, if he has any other name, it has no social value to you.
Nevertheless, Google suspended Obscure’s Google+ account just a short time ago, under the Community Standards – the relevant section of which reads:
Display Name
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 these would be acceptable.
(Emphasis mine)
Note that this appears to apply to Google profiles generally, and not just Google+.
This is troublesome. Of the 436 people that I currently have in my Google+ circles, fewer than ten of those use the name that they carry in their wallets. The funny thing is that that isn’t terribly new. My father, and his contemporaries rarely did either. In post-War Australia it seemed commonplace for use-names to diverge quite significantly from wallet names. I was probably fifteen before I found out that the name in my father’s wallet wasn’t the one that he used on a day-to-day basis, and then shortly after found out that very few people did.
My hair-dresser’s name wasn’t Sylvia. The notorious Granny Steele (whom some few thought to be a witch) – well, she wasn’t a Granny, and actually she wasn’t a ‘Steele’ either (I couldn’t tell you if she was a witch or not). The list goes on. Turns out that my uncle, a prominent QC, didn’t wear his wallet-name either. I used to know a guy called Toasted Cheese (after the famous poem, that even now you are struggling to identify) and another called Zaphod. Heaven knows what their wallet-names were. It didn’t matter.
As a society we acquired use-names and just used them, indifferent to getting a deed-poll done, since the government cheerfully allowed (and allows) us to use those alternates for both government and business usages. Some even simply put their wallet-names instead of their accreted ones in the “Are you known by any other names” section of the forms.
I asked my father back then, if he never used his wallet name, why not get if formally changed?
“If you never use it, why bother changing it?” he replied, and lectured me on the persistence of identity, and the application of labels and nomenclature. My dad rocked, by the way.
Officially as of 24 February, Google’s public policy position (“The freedom to be who you want to be”) was that pseudonymous use of a number of Google products was fine. Even to go so far as implicitly encouraging it.
Someone at Google clearly didn’t get that memo, or maybe it’s just that Google+ (or anything tied to a Google Profile) is exempt from that policy.
Google profiles are becoming somewhat pervasive, increasingly interconnecting the various Google products, and the pseudonymity that Google supports in some products is inherently undermined if it starts whacking connected profiles based on a suspicion that a name isn’t what people “usually call you”.
Pseudonymous usage is apparently just fine, until Google decides it wants you to pony up a photo ID. This isn’t about Opensource Obscure specifically, but his suspension devalues Google+ for me just a little bit. One down, four hundred and thirty-five to go. But as even Google will well tell you, it’s the network effects that matter. Each individual generates more value to the network than simple user numbers would suggest.
Obscure has submitted an appeal over the suspension, but since it is such a subjective matter, I find myself doubting that it will be successful.
I contacted Google for an official comment and an explanation of the seeming dichotomy, but Larry and Sergey’s corporate behemoth was slow in providing any official statement on the matter. Being Australian, I suspect my enquiry was routed to an Australian PR representative without anyone thinking for a moment, “Wait. It is after-hours on a Friday there, nobody will be there to answer for more than two days.” If I hear back from them, I’ll add in their comments.
In the absence of an official response, I suppose it comes down to whether some administrative bod – in their limited experience – thinks that the name you’re using is the name people know you by … or not.
I wonder what Mark Twain would have had to say. I’m guessing he wouldn’t have bothered to have Samuel Clemens sign up to a Google Profile to say it.
Thanks Tateru!
A great and insightful article as usual.
I’m willing to fight for this – at least a bit!
As you wrote, this isn’t just about me – even if I I like Google+ and want to get playing with it, using my Opensource Obscure identity and the huge social graph I built around it – but it’s about hundreds, maybe thousands of other Second Life users who may want to do the same.
I’ll keep you updated.
Everybody feel free to contact me in private if needed – my email is opensourceobscure@gmail.com
To be honest, I am not even entirely sure what business of Google’s it is if you just made up a name specifically to use Google+ with, which I did. I suppose they would prefer it if people could search for you – they insist that profiles be public – but perhaps I would like to manage my identity in a different way. (Specifically, since I was thinking that I might want to talk to people who knew me by different names, and I could not have multiple profiles for different circles, I would use a “neutral” name, which may or may not have worked but perhaps I will never know now.)
Google can I think reasonably require that you use a consistent identifier while using G+ (which is rather taken care of by your sign-in) and that you do not try to impersonate or misrepresent other people. Apart from that, consistency of identity with other areas may be nice but isn’t necessary, for “real names” or “pseudonyms”.
hmmm, I love my “pseudonym” even more then my own name… I like to keep the too split as far as I can too.
In the meantime I don’t have access yet to Google Plus… but I finally got around to filling my Google Profile. Can’t wait to see if Google plus is more useful then Facebook. And yes, My Facebook account for my SL pseudonym is still up there… Who knows for how long? LOL
Sadly it was most likely due to “OpenSource” being a very uncommon word used as a name. I no doubt would get away with using my own alias as it just happens to be a real name first name, although not my own. I don’t think Google asks for verification. It’s a pity that we all can’t call ourselves what we want, but I have a feeling most “That could actually be someone’s real name” type aliases will go unhindered on Google+.
I hear that they are going to launch a separate version of Google+ for “brands” – maybe they consider pen-names, avatars, etc to be that!
But agree with the thoughts.
@openspace So, was this suspension before or after you asked Google what their policy was? At 3:27 you announced that your account is suspended. This is about two and a half hours after i suggested to you on Twitter that it might be prudent to adopt a “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy about the matter, since I was willing to wager with you that Google’s policy would be similar, if not the same as, Facebook’s. The Facebook policy is old news now. We are simply “Fake” and therefore don’t deserve to exist in their eyes. No amount of appealing does any good once they are on to you. So far, you’ve given me no reason to think that Google will be any different.
This doesn’t seem to be an entirely isolated incident. Dom Ramsey has been getting some pushback from a Google admin bod for not using a ‘real photo’ of himself.
@Wizard Gynoid. They sadly seem to forget that there always is a real person behind the pseudonym. “Whats in a name, a name we give our selfs”…
It was very disappointing to hear about Opensource Obscure Google+ being suspended this morning because of using a SL avatar identity. I hope this won’t keep on happening for the SL community that have just created Google+ accounts there.
Facebook has deleted SL accounts in recent months which is not a good sign.
Interesting article and thoughts about Google, Tateru.
Face it. Both Google and Facebook are in the business of collecting and collating information about Real People. It is entirely within their self-serving interest to attempt to force you to connect your RL name to an “alias.” Many of us get away with it (so far) on Facebook by keeping our heads down and under the radar. A related issue has to do with the fact that the Google and Facebook servers are on U.S. soil, making them subject to the Patriot Act. What this means is that they will reveal your private information to the U.S. Government upon request. All of this is making Diaspora more attractive. https://joindiaspora.com/
P.P.S. I got the same reaction from Quora. They pushed back at me so I just stopped using the product.
Google’s pretty much jumping in their own mouth by this. I don’t want to believe they are trying to be Facebook and ban SL (or any other kind of) avatars, mostly because I like the service.
Problem is that they haven’t stated the reason for blocking OO’s account (saying that it’s against CS is not saying anything). Maybe it’s not about SL but some clerk in the Googleplex thought it is a business or organization or something, in which case the whole mess might be cleared. Or maybe they really gave themselves to the dark side.
It’s always so delightful to find out that others “out there” on the ‘Net have the right to determine my own personal validity. *sigh*
It’s curious to me that Google would push for a real photo, since facebook allows you anything that’s not explicitly against the TOS.
I wonder, if I signed up as Ziggy Quirk (a sometimes avi these days) would they boot me? Facebook – although my Ziggy account was reported more than once – never did. I suppose it’s a possible genuine name.
My final thought is what about The Naughty See Monkey, who is a local artist who has legally changed his name (it’s not Sea, it’s See). I suspect if he tried anything on either FB or G+ he’ll have a hell of a time. Poor guy.
I once worked with two people, one of whom was named after the OPEC organisation, and the other whose name looked like an excerpt from a functional programming language. Parents do all sorts of weird things to their kids.
[...] Plus IdentitiesGoogle and the freedom to be who you want to be, at least if it is not on Google Plus; http://eicker.at/GooglePlusIdentities [...]
The real problem here is depending on Google or Facebook or any other single corporate behemoth for online social networking and profiles.
We need to do it the way blogs are done, or the way e-mail is done. That is, with standard protocols that anybody can use and implement. That way, if a given provider has pseudonym policies you don’t like, you can just switch somewhere else, and everything continues to work. That’s how it is with e-mail. That’s how it is with your blog. The world seriously needs standardized open “social networking” protocols so that we’re not stuck with either Facebook or Google profiles as a way of advertising our information in a way where we can quickly and in a standard way form connections.
When crucial networking infrastructure for the bulk of the community is controlled by a single company, you’re at that company’s mercy. What’s more, it provides a nice juicy single target for pressure from law enforcement to put in policies like this.
And, yes, this is just as true with Linden Lab….
It may happen one day, but sadly, at the moment, most of the investment in the arena seems to be towards building individual walled gardens rather than building into some sort of shared infrastructure.
Lyn:
Google doesn’t ask your for a real photo. Before I was suspended today, I had participated in a Google+ discussion where -after some confusion- Google employees made clear that you CAN use a fictional picture as your profile photo on Google+.
Providing Google with a real photo is an OPTIONAL step for those who need to verify their identity after Google suspended them for having an unauthentic name.
Excellent write-up!
When I wrote the open letter on Google+, somebody told me I missed the point. With this latest reality check from Google, I’d say it was on point and clearly outlined what should happen to satisfy both the end-users and Google’s interests. It’s not so much that Google doesn’t explicitly say you cannot use an avatar name or pseudonym on a profile, but more along the lines that they haven’t specifically said you can, nor set any provisions in place openly to address the circumstances by which such would be appropriate and manageable. It’s better to lay the cards on the table and bring it to light than to just assume everything will work out.
Pseudonyms and Avatars to me are one and the same, but more than that – the Avatar Identity is just as bit legitimate and real, if not more in that our avatar identities and pseudonyms often have wider reach and recognition than our “real life” selves as defined by social media companies. In light of the fact that multiplicity of identity is expected to become more common, if not the de-facto standard going forward, Google needs to figure out a way to handle that reality properly.
And yes, this is a case of Mark Twain versus Samuel Clemens.
I hope OpenSource Obscure get’s the account back (unsuspended) because that would show a proper understanding on Google’s part for this issue and what needs to happen going forward.
[...] Nino has written a good article on what is happening. See: Google seemingly split on pseudonymous Google+ accounts and Google Profiles – It’s okay until it…. She makes many good points in the article. Opensource's Facebook [...]
Wizard has it right; Google+, FaceBook, even Twitter are information gathering systems. If the information they gather is tied to a “fictional” identity (as opposed to the identity who spends RL money) it is of no value to the advertisers who pay for that information.
Until / unless this situation changes I will remain among the socially unnetworked. My privacy and security is too important to me to play games with it.
This is the identity that spends money. Also the one that earns it.
Judging from the February 24th proclamation. It seems that these two parts of Google’s bureaucracy have not gotten their act together on just what Google’s overall policy is on anonymity.
I MUST assume that any entity on the internet that insists on connecting identity to a ‘real’ email address or a real person, is at least considering the financial gains they might make from data mining.
Data mining is the raison d’etre for Facebook. Will Google + be any different?
They talk a good game, but we are starting to see their true colors here……
To put this another way: The avatar name has a “typist” behind it who IS a real person, and often that avatar is a much a part of who he is in cyberspace as his meatspace self is when he’s not in cyberspace. That typist buys things in cyberspace. That typist goes places in cyberspace. The only difference is that he’s wearing a different set of clothes, so to speak, when he’s that avatar name than when he’s wandering around in meatspace.
My philosophy of life for a very long time has been: Do not wrong any person. Ever. It does not matter what form they wear on the outside if the person behind that form has done no wrong, and you penalize that person purely on superficial details. If you penalize someone purely on the form they wear on the outside, then you have harmed an innocent. It is NEVER EVER appropriate to harm an innocent, it doesn’t matter how sincere you might be about it, there WILL be negative consequences for you somewhere along the line, either in the here and now or in the hereafter. (See Matthew 25:31-46, particular verse 45.) If this avatar name IS the primary form that this person appears as in cyberspace, then those who deny him or her that identity here are doing themselves great harm.
If they’re primary purpose behind providing end users with a means of communicating with their fellow users, and with maintaining their connections with those fellow users, is purely as a means of gathering of marketing information, then they are forgetting the main purpose they exist here for: the serve those end users! Anything that gets in the way of serving their end users, first and foremost, is secondary. If, as an added bonus, they have emassed large amounts of tracking and marketing information, then that’s gravy, but it should not be allowed to trump the fact that they’re ultimate purpose is to serve their end users first. Do not get the cart before the horse!
At that, if the user that has an avatar-based name is the primary identity that the typist presents to the world, then it IS valid marketing data you are gathering from that name, since they DO most of their buying and selling in cyberspace while surfing under that name. In fact, the typists identity (that is, his or her meatspace self) and that avatar name and form are inseparably linked to each other, so the very notion that one should split the “fictional character” (what a crock!) from the person’s cyberspace presence is bogus in the extreme, it’s like WalMart declaring someone to not be a real customer because he’s wearing a blue sweater instead of a gold one, or because he dyed his hair bright purple and formed a Mohawk with it! If the person operates just like any other real person (i.e., he shops!) than HE IS a real customer, not a “fictional character!” He should be treated exactly the same as anyone else!
I DO hope that Google+ garner a HUGE backlash from this, and are forced to retract this policy and publicly apologize. They need to be BETTER THAN Facebook, they need to be on the moral high ground ABOVE Facebook on this. If they behave just like Facebook, then they are no BETTER than Facebook, and don’t DESERVE the customers who were wronged by Facebook to be coming to them. If they show themselves to be of a higher moral grounds than Facebook (by not discriminating against someone purely on the name they choose for themselves), then they will go far. If they show themselves to be nothing but slaves to marketroids’ shortsidedness and their wrongheaded thinking (i.e. crackpot theories about what a “made up” name means in marketspace), then this Google+ thing deserves to crash and burn, because if they’re doing this to one group, they WILL do unjust things to other groups, too, and it is best that such behavior on their part be stopped NOW, before they get into the habit of doing it to other, bigger groups later.
Let me repeat that last bit: If they do this to a smaller group (i.e. us SecondLifers), they WILL do something like this, or some other kind of wrong, to other, larger groups, and therefore must learn they cannot, and should not, get away with doing it to ANY group, large OR small!
This made me think of a blog post from Google earlier this year where they described the 3 kinds of identities they recognize and allow across all their services. In brief:
Undentified: Not logged in but still using services. Little more than IP Addresses and cookies tracked.
Pseudonymous: Signed in with an online identity not linked to offline self.
Identified: You are who you are, and this is necessary for obvious things like Google Checkout, and less obvious things like whatever Quora and Facebook need your real identity for.
The entire read is here: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2011/02/freedom-to-be-who-you-want-to-be.html
My only input is that Google+ is a competitor to both Twitter and Facebook. Google’s Eric Schmidt has already gone on record many times when questioned about Facebook and identity to say things like “identity” is valuable in improving search results and targeted ads. So, its always going to be true that the more personal and exact information we give Google, the better we make their core product in their minds.
I think what dictates 99% of Google’s profit is going to trump any “do no evil” clauses, so for anyone that had any ideas of Google+ not adopting Facebook-esque policies when it comes to the amount and validity of personal data they want…I wouldn’t hold my breath for it. Google’s hands are in everything from payment processing with Checkout to new Groupon-esque deals sites to shopping products and so on…in a lot of ways I’d worry about Google more than Facebook if I cared about staying pseudonymous a whole lot.
[...] Tateru Nino has a really good post about names, or more to the point why official names aren’t always the way we are known, it’s something Facebook simply won’t accept (and one really needs to ask why) and it seems Google are confused over the idea, which is odd to say the least as GMail is advertising was historically based on our conversations, not our names. Social networks will not win this battle, we will always draw ourselves into shells when we feel too much is being exposed and until a social network comes along that allows us to control whom we are, rather than the social network determining whom they want us to be, these conflicts will continue. [...]
The whole issue of authenticity is really historically interesting in America because of our being an entire nation of immigrants (well mostly). Its always been perfectly legal in the U.S. to be anyone you want to be so long as you do not commit fraud doing so. This is a well established and honored American tradition. So interesting that suddenly, in a virtual worldscape that Avatars are suddenly bereft of this right.
They really want the name on your credit card don’t they? really? … I mean, that’s the one that’s worth money…. the rest is an annoyance for them.
Sod ‘em.
@ Rob Knop “The real problem here is depending on Google or Facebook or any other single corporate behemoth for online social networking and profiles.
We need to do it the way blogs are done, or the way e-mail is done. That is, with standard protocols that anybody can use and implement. ”
Take a look at the open source social networking project Diaspora. It might be along the lines of what you’re looking for. https://joindiaspora.com/
@Shug Maitland, you have a point that Google+, FB, and Twitter are gathering information to market to individuals who spend money. But you missed the mark at the end of your statement.
Who are they marketing to? Who spends the money? Sure “real world” people, the ones with the job, the government issued picture ID, bank accounts and credit cards. But WHERE are they marketing? ONLINE. Where every Avatar and pseudonym spends a good majority of their time. Many of us work online, shop online, blog, read our news, connect socially and professionally ONLINE under our PSEUDONYM. We are not Artificial Intelligence. It is just not some dummy terminal controlling our browsing habits and posts. We are a real person and YES WE DO see all those ads and commercials. The information they are gathering to display on what ever website we go to is JUST as valid for Sierra Sugar as it is for the name on my birth certificate. MORE so because i spend more time online in SL, blogs, FB, Google, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, etc… under Sierra Sugar. So they whole disclose your birth given or legally recorded name for marketing and advertising purposes, information gathering, etc… is still completely invalid. If they want to market something to me they have a much better chance following Sierra Sugar’s web habits than my RL name, cause i rarely EVER use that on the web. Most of my RL friends know me as Sierra, and even my employers know about the pseudonym.
Facebook actually refused to let me use my avatar name to open an account. I was told my name was “invalid”. This was obviously an automated response, but I found it interesting.
I have little interest in being a product, I have a FB account in my birth name with as little information as possible and privacy locked as much as possible to stay in touch with friends and family there. I have a couple of gmail accounts I use for nothing important, and after the Google Buzz fiasco have never created a Google profile. I see no advantage for me in consolidating my information into a tidy easily marketable package.
What I await is a service that offers the same things as these in a subscription service, so that I am actually the customer. I suspect I will be waiting some time
I have a suspicion this decision was made by some chairwarmer somewhere, based on pure theory of how he thinks marketing might work, rather than on the way some of their users actually do things. Pure theory doesn’t always match with real-world activity: sometimes demographics turn out to be more complicated than they think it is, and comes in forms they didn’t expect that are harder to easily pidgeonhole. If they expected some sort of binary 1 or 0 kind of thing where an identity is demonstrably either 100% real or 100% false, or that it is either 100% one thing or it is 100% its polar opposite, then they’re living in a dream world, or at least that chairwarmer is.
If this action of theirs turns into a PR nightmare for them, they deserve it.
On the other hand, if this results in a collective facepalm on their part, and they quickly change their policy to accommodate us Second Lifers there, under OUR terms instead of theirs (i.e. no expectation that we give them any other name than the SL name we’ve already poured our RL self into like water into a jug), it could be a win-win for them, since they’d STILL get our internet behavior to track, where allowed by the user (bearing in mind the coming rules about allowing users, by law, to opt out of some internet tracking), and as has already been pointed out…. we’re not that different than any other doggy in cyberspace (“On the Net, no one knows your a dog!” remember?), and they’d get lots of the other people who are fed up with how Facebook have conducted themselves, too.
The thing that Google seem to have forgotten is that this Google+ thing was largely attractive to a lot of people because it was NOT Facebook, that it was expected to be more ethical than Facebook about how it treated its guests, be better than Facebook in how it treated its guests… so when they start behaving straight out of the starting gate as if they think they ARE another Facebook… they lose one of the big things that brought those people to Google+ in the first place, and those people might as well just stay at Facebook.
I’m sure Google would love for Google+ to become another Facebook. Why would they want anything less? 700 million profiles and still growing worldwide.
What those of us pushing pseudonymity have to realize is the business model of advertising to firm identities is very, very profitable and the vast majority of users of Facebook have 0 qualms about sharing who they are on legal forms and actually derive value from sharing as much about themselves as possible. There’s nothing wrong with this and its why Facebook is so loved.
At the same time there is obviously a niche market for a pseudonymity based social network. The folks getting kicked off Facebook and now Google+ are proof of this. But support for that niche more than likely isn’t going to come from the biggest advertisers on the internet.
This is truly very bad news.
As a Google customer, I want to use their services like Google AdSense to get my ads to be seen by Second Life residents, and, vice-versa, I want ads related to Second Life to appear on the sites under my administration to whomever comes in with an avatar name. I rely upon Google’s no-nonsense, do-no-evil policy to allow me to do that. If they start “going Facebook” on me, I have no choice but to dump their ad/profiling services… and go to Microsoft instead
I posted some comments over here, too:
http://www.thinq.co.uk/2011/7/8/google-starts-account-cull-google/
…and made a a couple other points there that I didn’t make here: that VR-related identities are going to become more commonplace given time. And that, Google+ being new and small, it is easier for them to realize they’ve made a mistake (say, in in excluding SL-identity types) and change things, then it would be if months or years down the road they realize they missed the boat with us, because right now it would be a lot easier to retool things for VR-world identities than it might be if they have to do so retroactively several years on.
One thing just occurred to me, though: There ARE still people anticipating a “3D Web” kind of thing, where virtual reality places exist on practically all websites, independent of any “grid” like SL or InWorldz, but that functions as one great big virtual world, and where the identity we use ON those VR places, and the virtual inventory associated with that identity, also exists independently of any grid. Basically an SL-ish experience, but with the walls of the “walled garden” (SL and InWorldz are each a “walled garden”) taken down. I am actually watching one project with exactly that goal in mind, and have an account there, because I WANT to see something like that happen!
It may very well be that a couple of years down the road, Google+ will REALLY wish they’d left us in place there, particularly if that project I’m talking about eventually becomes bigger than SL, InWorldz, OSGrid, and all the other grids like that combined. Mind you, that’s a big if. But if this project doesn’t get that far, someone else’s ‘take down the walls around the gardens” project will.
Google already knows my mundane name for lots of other purposes, and I use it with Facebook anyway (which has a similar bias against pseudonyms), so I’m kind of “whatever.” But I answer to my Second Life name anyway, given that it incorporates my usual “handle” ever since I was in college. At this point, anybody who really gave a damn could figure out the connection, I just don’t feel a need to shout it in everyone’s face.
Google PR has responded, but the response needs a little more clarification I think, so I’m back in the waiting loop.
We need to keep pressing them, firmly but politely, to recognize that there are plenty of people who don’t want their real-name attached to their online self, but still do lots and lots of stuff online, and are therefore potentially of great value to them.
And as I have already stated, just because people with SL-style identities in cyberspace are a tiny subset of the online population now doesn’t mean that the percentage of people going primarily by their VR-identities in regular cyberspace aren’t going to go up later, the number could go WAY up, particularly if that decentralized-grid thing I was talking about — either the one I’m a customer of, or someone else’s entirely — takes off. The stated goal of that project is for someone to be able to create his own little SecondLife-ish VR island in cyberspace as easily as he puts up a webpage now.
Google PR says that further clarification will be available on Monday. So… waiting.
Well, I hope it’s one that benefits us. oo
Thanks for the persistence and updates, Tateru.
“I’m not giving my name to a machine!”
Bender Bending Rodriguez:- Futurama, My Three Suns, 1ACV07
After a review, Google has rejected Opensource Obscure’s appeal. His Google profile will remain suspended.
If someone feels the need to tell you they are not evil, they usually are. Google has always been evil and all about collecting information about us. I believe in the near future, anonymity will be illegal. Governments are already shooting for it. Corporations are clamoring for it too.
Earlier today, I received an email from a reputation protector service. They told me where I lived, with a google streetview photo of my home. My birthdate, names of a number of people I know, my unlisted phone number, the last five online purchases I made (from different companies), five of the email addresses I use most, a speeding ticket I got two years ago and a number of other facts. They offered to show me my full report and show which places were storing this information for the low price of 29.99!
I’m very careful with my information. I don’t use any social collect-all-my-data sites. And still they have all this information. Even if it’s a scam, I don’t want even this much stuff being available to the world. But maybe it’s not even worth the fight. The government and corporations will win this battle, not me. I’m seriously thinking about just getting off the internet altogether. It’s been fun, but it’s stealing our souls.
Lili. that’s the sort of thing which makes me very glad that I live in the EU, where it would be a crime to share personal data such as that without permission.
The problem with pseudonyms and advertising is that, even if the pseudonym is a significant, consistent, trackable, presence, it’s not the name/identity that gets put on an actual order/payment. They don’t know which advert brought that transaction to them.
In the past, they hardly ever did. So what’s new. But the appeal of internet adverts is that they can make a connection, quite easily. In the end, they think their knowledge gives them power, and, as Lord Acton said, power tends to corrupt.
Doing no evil is useless if it is just a slogan. It needs a continuing effort, a repeated active choice. If you’re familiar with the Gospels, you’ll know what’s in Matthew 25, and you will have to be ready to make the right choice when it comes.
Your religion, or whatever the basis for your morality is, doesn’t have to be Christian. You don’t have to believe in any supernatural entity. But words without action, they’ll break you soon enough.
This blog post is really interesting, it strongly implies that Google+ may very well be breaking Federal law by removing avatar accounts. Hmmmm….
http://cityofnidus.blogspot.com/2011/07/google-and-future-of-avatar-identity.html?utm_source=Andromeda+Blog
Very interesting discussion there, too.
If it is done on the basis of name alone it can certainly be considered discriminatory.
Well I see all the usual suspects are all present and accounted for on google+. Except Opensource Obscure. I spent some time following circle links of well known SL avatars and there was only one link that returned a 404. Opensource Obscure. Perhaps one of the former Lindens that went to Google is behind the removal of Opensource Obscure. I don’t see google wiping out hordes of avatar accounts. From what I see only one of 100,000 got whacked. Tempest in a teacup?
It all hinges on what Google’s policy is – I should have more back from Google about it in a few hours.
“@openspaceobscure before my suspension I contacted Google asking for clearer name policy, so they may have focused on me.”
so he stirred up the issue by inquiring. i tried to tell him to keep his head down.
It would have happened sooner or later. Better now than suddenly in six months time, right?
My alter-ego (under which I am posting) is more real than me. I have avoided Facebook because they explicitly disallow pseudonymous accounts. I’lll happily dump google if they turn out to also be so shortsighted.
I’m wondering if the reason I can not push a Googe+ invite to my other gmail account – the one for the completely separate other part of my life, not a sockpuppet account – after days of trying, is that both are linked on my android phone (the only place they are linked – I normally use them in different browsers etc, but it was just too convenient to have both right there on Android – bad mistake).
But it could as easily have been a business account and a personal one, a parent monitoring their teenagers email from their phone (ew), a couple putting both emails on one smartphone while travelling. People have multiple account for multiple reasons. Stop inconveniencing them for not using things the way you would, google. And pseudonymous is not anonymous.
@NotMyNormalName: “…pseudonymous is not anonymous.”
This sums it up, doesn’t it? When I first put up my Facebook profile under my real name, people had trouble finding me, because they mostly know me by my DJ name. One can find me all over the web under my DJ name. That’s not anonymity.
Sort it out, Google.
[...] reading about Opensource Obscure’s run-in with Google+ (also covered here), I was pondering the following question: As (presumably) authors writing under pen names and SAG [...]
Back in the days when I joined the internet, using your real name was very uncommon. Nowadays using a pseudonym seems to be a breach of most service’s TOS. Times they are a-changin.
As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, Google – like Facebook — is totally missing the point here.
One thing is, of course, identity theft. I’m sure that everybody would want Google to deal with that swiftly. Lady Gaga wouldn’t be happy if a thousand people joined Google Plus claiming to be Lady Gaga. That’s one side of the story which I believe everybody would agree with. And I would also agree that it’s different to use ladygaga@gmail.com as an email address and having a fake profile with lots of pictures of Lady Gaga.
The other thing is pseudonymity, and that has a wide range of possibilities. For example, what would be so wrong about having J. K. Rowling creating a Google Plus account under “Harry Potter”? (which is not even a pseudonym but a fictional character, trademarked by Rowling’s estate). People are more likely to know who “Harry Potter” is than “J. K. Rowling”. They would love to befriend “Harry Potter” and stay in touch with what “Harry Potter” says — announcements about the books and movies and so forth. Now, this is “hot” data. Millions might follow “Harry Potter” (but not J. K. Rowling), and that profiling data will tell advertisers a lot about common interests and allow them to tailor ads to pop up every time someone manifests a desire to be part of a Circle including “Harry Potter”. Bookstores, DVD stores, and so forth would immensely benefit from knowing that there is a specific hangout (pun intended) where Harry Potter fans usually exchange information, and be able to target it with their ads.
So-called “avatar names” — an expression which I personally dislike; it’s discriminatory because it implies that “avatars” somehow are second-class citizens — are not different. In fact, they’re nothing more and nothing less than “handles” (more than merely nicknames) associated with a wealth of data. SL residents, of course, share SL as a common passion — but SL is not all what they share. They share fashion experiences; techie experiences; common tastes; artistic values and discussions; a certain attitude towards online immersion; and so forth. All this is raw data worth millions to be mined and profiled in order to present to potential ad buyers.
But it goes even deeper than that. SL residents with their pseudonyms are eager online shoppers — of course, a few rely on freebies, but the majority is already willing to spend money on online products, goods, and services. Specially digital goods and digitally-produced services (like, say, DJ’ing or machinima production). Compared to the average Internet user, SL residents are far more willing to shop online (because that’s what they do in SL) and buy digital goods without physical counterparts — be they music, video, software, or any other thing. They’re used to subscription services (Premium accounts, tier). And it should be very easy for a data mining expert to prove the huge difference, on average, between the SL population and the non-SL population in all those areas. So, in effect, SL residents are above-the-average online consumers. What kind of company scorns that type of market? If they just had access to a list of SL residents’ email addresses (something that LL will never volunteer — they might get hacked, but that’s not the same thing as volunteering that data), it would be way, way more valuable than a random sample of email addresses from so-called “real name” Google Profiles.
So someone is utterly missing the point at Google and not even understanding what business model Google operates under. They’re a mass-data-mining operation which sells targeted ads. Pseudonyms of SL residents are way more valuable than “real names” because all these residents are way more prone to shop online and click on online ads for products and services, specially digital (non-physical) ones. That kind of information is valuable to advertisers. If I worked at Google, I would not only embrace SL pseudonyms eagerly and work together with LL to get an arrangement to extract as much data from SL residents as possible, but I would actually sell that information more expensively than a batch of random “real names” which might or not might shop online at all, no matter how persuasive the ads targeted for them might be.
So they’re also shutting down the opportunity to sell ads to roughly 20 million SL residents. Of course I know not all are active; but the same can be said from any sample of 20 million “real names” that Google might have on their database. All they can say is, “here is a group of 20 million users that have far higher probability of shopping online. All of them have one thing in common: they love Second Life”. As a placer of ads myself, I’m interested that my ads only target Second Life residents (because none of the things I sell are targeted to anyone else but SL residents). Google is simply closing a market of 20 million potential users. It would be as silly as to exclude Australians from Google Plus (also a market of roughly 20 million people), because, well, Australians might have “funny names” or look strange on pictures.
Nevermind justice, fairness, discriminative policies, and so forth; Google, like any other corporation, mostly listens to their wallet and their clients. And in this case what they’re just saying is that a half-a-billion US$ market with 20 million users “doesn’t interest Google and their advertisers”. I find that simply stupid in the business sense of the word; no self-styled CEO would throw that opportunity out of the window and remain in office after making such a stupid decision…
But then again, fanaticism — and ostracising pseudonyms is really nothing more than a form of fanaticism tied to discriminatory procedures — is hardly ever rational…
[...] see why. Pseudonymous identities can be every bit as authentic as real ones. (Google+ has already run into a dilemma on this issue.) Moreover, each identity actually has to be accepted into your chosen cliques, so behavioral norms [...]