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quote from LJ post:

I am sick and tired of being told that in order to participate in the internet I have to tell you my full name and gender. I am tired of being told there's nothing wrong with this by people who obviously are not women and/or a minority on the internet. It's impressive that a company like google can operate in willful ignorance of basic internet history. One of the reasons the internet really caught on was that it ,it let scared, afraid and lonely people connect with other scared, afraid and lonely people with similar problems. One of the reasons these people were/are scared is that simply being themselves puts their lives/jobs/safety at risk.

Forcing me to be female on the internet, no matter what I'm doing, is just an open invitation for harassment as soon as I dare to be controversial in the wrong male forum. In this case controversial means having a mildly different opinion than the majority. Imagine if I were to do something radical like talk about my disability, psychological problems and sexuality in an atmosphere that does not care to protect me in any way.

Apparently this is a concept google has not strained itself to understand.

I would love if someone could write up, with links, a clear and concise message to google that I and others would be more than happy to send to google as feedback of their new social site. Because don't get me wrong, I quite like it, even if I'm annoyed that google is being complimented with the "revolutionary" idea of filtering and circles (which seems pretty counter to their thoughts on private profiles, etc), but their disregard for the privacy and safety of a potentially large portion of their customers basically makes them Facbook 2.0 and there's a reason I don't use Facebook.

xenacryst

There's a post and discussion here regarding the legal status of using pseudonyms and avatar identities to enter into contracts:

http://cityofnidus.blogspot.com/2011/07/google-and-future-of-avatar-identity.html

Shortly, it may be the case in the US (and possibly other countries with similar common law regarding name changes) that it is illegal to require the use of a "real" name in any sort of contract, as long as the pseudonym/avatar identity is not used with fraudulent intent.

I'm not up to thinking through legal machinations tonight, but I put this out here as a way of getting the word out and keeping conversation going. G+/FB/others may be skirting shaky legal ground with their ToS policies.

ex_rising236

As I've updated https://sites.google.com/site/rowanium/ to reflect, my profile has been reinstated. Just thought I'd post here and let everyone know as well.

elke_tanzer

(I've just posted a similar version of this post in my G+, and the following is crossposted to my DW.)

I had been looking for an official confirmation from Google that both Pseudonymous and Identified use of the G+ service was fine, as I had understood the TOS I signed up under. This appears to be clear indication that Pseudonymous use of G+ is unwelcome and/or against the TOS.

I'm going to give this situation a couple more days, hoping that Google as a company will catch a clue. If not, then I'm out of there.

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2011/07/google-profiles-pseudonym-avatar-names-suspension-policy.html is not good news. Google as a company appears to still NOT understand the fundamental notion that some people have persistent pseudonyms which we absolutely require to NOT be associated publicly with our legal names.

Google, how is it that such a smart company does not understand these basic concepts of identity and safety concerns? How many times do people need to send feedback linking to http://geekfeminism.org/2011/07/08/social-networking-requirements/ and
http://geekfeminism.org/2011/07/08/anti-pseudonym-bingo/ ?

Sigh, indeed. More news on this can be found at http://geekfeminism.org/2011/07/10/the-status-of-pseudonymity-and-privacy-on-google/

(And oh, look, I have a tag already in use in my journal for how I feel about this: google can eat my shorts)

Current Mood: disappointed

elke_tanzer

(I originally posted this in my G+.)

Oh, this is just getting messier and messier... (disclaimer: I know very little about Second Life culture, but I respect and acknowledge that it's a common practice there, similar to in media fandom culture, to go by a pseudonym both online and offline in "daily life".)

Opensource Obscure (who was apparently TOSed from G+), and plenty of SecondLifers seem to be in the middle of another epicenter of discussion activity about the pseudonym issue. I started following some of these threads and blogposts late last night, and wow, some of the comment threads are getting toxic... a quick few links to check out:
http://dwellonit.taterunino.net/2011/07/08/google-seemingly-split-on-pseudonymous-google-accounts-and-google-profiles-its-okay-until-it-isnt/
https://plus.google.com/113892479804684135897/posts/FSsd9ePQZi7
http://www.thinq.co.uk/2011/7/8/google-starts-account-cull-google/
https://plus.google.com/102942054433646692990/posts/7u2H9RyDiPB
https://plus.google.com/107316733400561258834/posts/CWqCjXho2M7
http://dwellonit.taterunino.net/2011/07/11/follow-up-google-confirms-real-names-a-requirement-for-profilesplus-mostly/

Current Mood: distressed

elke_tanzer

I just posted the following linkspam to my G+, at https://plus.google.com/u/1/107619776564880847214/posts/9DqSD5QFVx1 , but in case I get TOSed, I wanted to archive it here as well.

ETA: I have a recommendation for anyone indecisive about whether to activate an account for their fannish name or for their legal name or some other name entirely, and whether they want to activate more than one account: Wait a few days. It's OK to take your time. This may not turn out to be a great fannish platform, after all.

( OMG this got long )

Current Mood: calm

justhuman

What I'm getting from the discussion is G+'s intent is to create a sitewide community standard, based on an old principle to the internet. When e-mail and bulletin boards were a new thing on the new internet, people said a lot of things -- a lot of things that moderators were sure that they wouldn't say using their own names.

I'm sure that's reaching in some cases, based on what I've heard in RL human spaces, but to an extent there was a point. Many people wouldn't have been as rude if they had known that they're employer might be reading and could link it to them. So it seems to me that G+ aim is pushing that community standard of politeness, except they are trying to extend it sitewide.

This doesn't serve fannish interests and ignores more than a decade of internet reality. The fannish community standard of communication is very different than the general public standard. I mean we put up a post and say we want to talk about graphic sex, toss up a cut tag and politeness has been observed. In that way our community is self-regulating. For good or bad we have plenty of mechanisms for regulating conversations within the community, even if it means subdividing into specialized groups. All the varied internet communities have done the same.

Journal Sites (LJ, Dreamwidth and the clones) wer really a proto-social networking site. I remember the fannish bristling years ago when LJ self-identified as a social networking platform. We as users saw a substantial difference between communication on LJ verses MySpace and Facebook. And while there is a substantial difference in the way we communicate, I don't think anyone doubts that LJ is a form of social networking nowadays.

The big difference? Ease of sharing information. Facebook automates sharing details - it tells anyone I've ever chatted with that yesterday I said I liked NCIS and wanted to read the feed from Buy.Com. It has one button ability to let people that watch me know that I've been chatting about some interest that people didn't know I had.

In contrast in LJ, I can join a comm about corgi breeding and no one on my f-list would know about it unless they chose to cruise my profile and look up my comms. Or, you know, I chose to tell everyone about it. I haven't played with it in a while, but I believe we can also hide our comm list, so on LJ I could indulge my fannish and corgi interests and neither community would have to know about the other.

And when that was not enough separation, it's no big deal on LJ to create multiple pseuds to indulge in divergent interests.

G+ is not just trying to create a community standard. They are trying to create a site-wide community, based on the idea that people are more polite when they are using their real names. How successful executing this concept will be, including verifying people are using their real names, is yet to be seen and you can place your bets.

Based on this, I find it difficult to see a way that fandom could create an independent fiefdom, like we have on LJ and Dreamwidth

justhuman

I decided to link in my Picasa photos to my G+ account. Now this Picasa account is my fannish one, so there is nothing that I would want to hide. Still... exposure.

When I was linking my national park pictures on my LJ, I assumed a limited audience that would see my posts and follow my links. Also, some of the odder pics had context in my write ups. The galleries were public, so that someone looking from a search page would see a "random someone's" national park pics.

So if someone's looking at my G+, they're hit with all my public galleries, with or without context.

I played with logging in and logging out last night and you can limit the visibility in G+ of picasa pics by marking them as "share with anyone who has the link"

Then you can share the photos with a circle and keep them semi-private.

Now we reach the next level of privacy question, which is an existing privacy issue.

If I give a link on my LJ to a group of folks, they can repost the link.
If I share "with a link" picassa pics on G+, they can immediately re-share my pics.

This is the same security issue, but to me there is something about the ease and speed that this information will move using an easy button click verses someone creating a post.

ex_rising236

I participated a small amount in a bit of the name/nym discussion on a post. This is one of the discussions in which we had privileged white men going all that real names were good, and about five minutes into my discussion, I found that I was getting an error -- my profile had been reported, and apparently suspended. There are people like that out there.

If you're using a pseudonym be careful of taking part in any public discussion, whatsoever.

elke_tanzer

Thing #423 which I didn't realize I needed to be concerned about when I activated G+: Google encouraging-vs-requiring people to use photographs of our own faces as profile images. *headdesk* It looks like at this point, they're "encouraging", not "requiring" for all G+ users. Can I just keep linking folks to http://geekfeminism.org/2011/07/08/social-networking-requirements/ again and again, please?

I have just stumbled upon these, which relate to the names issue, the gender-in-profile issue, and also the issue of possibly being required to use photos of our own faces as our profile photo:
https://plus.google.com/106792630639449031994/posts/4v29vbteeG5
https://plus.google.com/106792630639449031994/posts/DEivCBm4qxs
https://plus.google.com/117198316664830078863/posts/GGjc1oqWxa9
https://plus.google.com/117198316664830078863/posts/EWFCZLEMf5r

Of course, http://www.google.com/intl/en-US/+/policy/content.html is also pertinent to all of these issues.

(crossposted to my G+ at https://plus.google.com/107619776564880847214/posts/KmQHcyxAUGi )

Current Mood: tired

elke_tanzer

Apparently Natalie Villalobos, Community Manager for the Google+ project, hosted a Hangout and/or chat thingie tonight, and the names & nyms issue was discussed.

ETA - The original quote source from Natalie herself is at https://plus.google.com/104013835962992611989/posts/9M8wFYgzwSK toward the bottom (11:40am pacific time) - END ETA

To quote here for posterity... Natalie Villalobos said: (the bold emphasis is mine)

You do not need to use your last name or even your "real name" but a name that you are commonly known by. You can put "Natalie V" with no symbol, as we no longer support symbols in the names fields. Here's what I have posted in public forums to help people bring their accounts out of suspension:

We've seen some complaints regarding profile suspensions, and I want to let you know how to solve this problem. Typically this problem occurs when you edit your name in a way that we no longer accept. In these situations, you may find that your name requires review to confirm that it complies with our Community Standards:

1) You’ll be prompted to request a review during the sign-up flow, this will lead to it being reviewed by our team.

2) After 24 hours, your profile will either be live or require further appeal.

3) To request further appeal, click on the link to our appeal form from your Google Profile. Here, you can provide additional information to support the claim that you are using a name in compliance with our policy.

4) Once you file the second appeal your profile will be handled via 1-to-1 communication with Google.

Okay, then. I'd still like to see http://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/answer.py?answer=1228271 clarified a bit more, but I guess this is progress. Sort of.

There've been many followups posted; here's one from Fox Magrathea Circe:
https://plus.google.com/113892479804684135897/posts/FSsd9ePQZi7

One great page I spotted today about the whole names & nyms issue is this:
http://geekfeminism.org/2011/07/08/social-networking-requirements/
and the links in the comments there are also informative...

Chronologically, here are some public posts from John Hardy about some aspects of the situation over the past few days:
https://plus.google.com/104013835962992611989/posts/iCMNPViRZMw
https://plus.google.com/104013835962992611989/posts/RUiCgtGnuPK
https://plus.google.com/104013835962992611989/posts/22zpasgxdEt
https://plus.google.com/104013835962992611989/posts/hvvsNJRBtpL
https://plus.google.com/104013835962992611989/posts/e31QKiSuJ6M

And for anyone who missed it a bit ago, there was:
http://geekfeminism.org/2011/07/08/anti-pseudonym-bingo/

(Bless the geekfeminism wiki, and big thanks to Mary and all of the other contributors there!)

Side note: If you have a shared Gmail account (for instance, if a fanpair posts coauthored stories together and has a single feedback email address! or if you and your domestic partner or spouse have a shared Gmail account!)... Google is not currently allowing group accounts on G+... each G+ account must correspond to a single person.

As far as I've seen, there is nothing saying that each person may only have one account... if we commonly go by two or three separate names in daily life, I think this means that we are in fact intended to use two or three separate G+ accounts, especially if we already used two or three separate Gmail accounts concurrently for some span of time... so... we simply activate the G+ features on each of our separate Gmail accounts and all might be well. And if so, the Multiple Login feature is really handy.

Current Mood: okay

elke_tanzer

Just another cautionary random thought about G+... being able to post to Extended Circles means that we should think twice about using that functionality, if we or someone we've encircled are following some of the "celebs" and/or "collectors" of G+ who have lots of folks following them and/or follow lots of people, right? ... There's a direction-vector somewhere in there that I'm not entirely clear on (my brain is kinda melty today), but... use 'Share With Extended Circles' with caution.

On LJ, I think the closest equivalent to Extended Circles would be FriendsFriends, but I'm not sure how close the DW equivalent is.

Fannish hivemind, can you help me out with this one?

(cross-posted to my G+ at https://plus.google.com/u/1/107619776564880847214/posts/8EXkCdvEHAM )

Current Mood: confused

dragonfly

Here's another thing. Twice now people have said in their journals that they've made G+ accounts, and have listed their username. But when I do a search on that username, I get nothing. G+ offers to let me add the username I searched for (whom G+ thinks doesn't exist), but only if I put in their email address (which I don't know, in either case).

Maybe their system needs time to refresh. (Or maybe those people have banned me! /o\ Just kidding. I doubt it.)

elke_tanzer

I'm going offline for most of the rest of today, but wanted to be sure that if anyone else needs invites, hopefully someone in this comm will be able to help. :-)

dragonfly

Has anyone else found that the circles you were given as a default included a banned circle with some people already in it? I have no idea why three people in my contacts list were "pre-banned." One of them was someone I was looking for. Not someone I would want to ban, and I don't know who the other two were.

indeliblesasha

If you need one, please PM me your address or leave it here, I'm screening the comments so your address isn't public. ♥

ETA Jul 11: I still have an invite button, and I'm happy to share. :)

elke_tanzer

If anyone needs a G+ invite, provide your email address... if you don't want to comment here, PM me.

(~~after I send an invite, I'm screening the comments here that provide email addresses, hopefully to prevent bot-scraping and stalkeryness and such~~ I'm screening all comments on this post now, d'oh, should have realized I could do that sooner!)

ETA much later, after I've lost count of the people who've joined G+ today: The little red envelope button has vanished. Looks like Google's closed the floodgates again.

elke_tanzer

Name issues with G+ may be a deal-breaker for me, and for much of fandom. Gotta keep an eye on this.

References:
https://plus.google.com/103325808503679220346/posts/U2L7mooA2yF
http://www.technologyquestions.com/2011/06/01/gfail-sorry-but-i-cannot-use-1-because-i-dont-meet-community-standards/
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=09855e7fbb13e027&hl=en
http://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1228271
http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2011/02/freedom-to-be-who-you-want-to-be.html

That final link there says that Google recognizes "Pseudonymous" use as one of the three uses that most of their products support. I really, really hope that holds true... otherwise I can't see fandom participating in G+, and in fact a bunch of techie types who go by online handles or nicknames that include non-Google-standard characters or no surname may also be turned away at the door.

(cross-posted to my Elke Tanzer G+ and also to

elke_tanzer)

ETA: If you care about this issue and already have a G+, please send feedback. Google is listening, apparently, but there are other voices saying loudly "real names good!".

ETA more: http://geekfeminism.org/2011/07/08/anti-pseudonym-bingo/

And ETA even more: http://geekfeminism.org/2011/07/08/social-networking-requirements/

And an even more even more ETA: UPDATE: http://googleplus.dreamwidth.org/5176.html

Current Mood: distressed

cavocorax

I know a lot of people are waiting to get into Google+, (myself included :p), so I thought I would create this post. I'm hoping that people who want an invite will leave a comment, and then if anyone actually has an extra invite, they'll have a pool of hopefuls to choose from. I believe all that is needed to create an account is a gmail address, so people can pm those they want to invite .

If you end up getting invited, please edit your comment or change it somehow so that others know you are taken care of. ;)

If there's a better way to do this, just let me know and I can modify this. I hope this will be useful.

elke_tanzer

Reference https://plus.google.com/113882113745075873153/posts/Gbg31WL621X

All it takes to create an invite is an email address to send it to. As far as I can tell, each person already in G+ can invite at least a handful of friends and acquaintances right now.

The 'Send Invites' button is a small red envelope button-thingie in the lower right-hand column.

ETA: And... the invite button has disappeared; they've turned invites off again. I believe that the share-a-G+-post-with-someone's-email-address-and-then-have-them-try-to-log-in method still may be working, but I suspect it's throttled somehow. Is anyone else here still looking for an invite?