[Stilgherrian writes: Oh dear. This post has generated a lot of interest. Thank you for that interest. But if you’re visiting for the first time, I strongly suggest you also read my lengthy response to commenters and the fair warning before posting your own comment.]
I knew this would happen sooner or later. Google, a data mining company in the United States, has the ignorant arrogance to tell me, a citizen of Australia, that my name — my legal name — doesn’t fit their scheme for how names “should” work. Well fuck you, arseholes!
What’s worse, this is how they tell you.
They suspend your profile, tell you your name is wrong, and tell you to change it.
Your profile has been suspended.
It appears that the name you entered doesn’t comply with our Names Policy.
The Names Policy requires that you use the name that you are commonly referred to in real life in your profile. Nicknames, maiden names, and so on, should be entered in the Other Names section of the profile. Profiles are currently limited to individuals; we will be launching a profile for businesses and other entities later this year.
Your profile will be suspended until you do edit your name to comply with the Names Policy: you will not be able to make full use Google services that require an active profile, such as Google+, Buzz, Reader and Picasa. This will not prevent you from using other Google services, like Gmail.
We understand that Google+ and it’s [sic] Names Policy may not be for everyone at this time. We would hate to see you go, but if you choose to leave, make a copy of your Google+ data first. Then, click here to leave Google+.
Listen, Googlecunts. This name precisely fits your Names Policy.
This is the name I’m “commonly referred to in real life”.
Did you even look to see if that were true before acting? No. Slack cunts.
Not only that, it’s the name that I have consistently used on every legal document, from passport to Medicare card, from property leases to witness statements, for thirty… fucking… years!
Oh, you’re worried about me putting a “.” in the surname field? That’s because I had to put something in there because your stupid fucked-up data verification code demanded that I not leave that field empty, even though that would be the morally and legally correct thing for me to have done.
What’s wrong is not my name. What’s wrong is your fucked-up Names Policy.
You stupid, stupid bastards clearly have no fucking idea how names work in the real world. For all your cleverness in building huge data centres to mine every scrap of personal information imaginable, somewhere along the line you’ve failed to Hoover up the fact that names don’t always fit into your neat Americo-centric first name / middle initial / last name pattern.
They never have, and they never will.
And don’t give me some bullshit excuse about how this is “unusual”. You’ve been in business for a decade. You’re one of the richest corporations on the planet. I know damn well there’s lots of good research on naming practices out there. Are you seriously suggesting that you build stuff without first reviewing the basics? Are you seriously suggesting that you’re incapable of dealing with the merely “unusual”?
What you also seem not to have figured out is how to open a conversation with someone about something as personal as their name.
You don’t fucking well start off by asserting they’re wrong and you’re right and they need to change. Show a bit of goddam humility, you cunts, and gently enquire whether things are as they seem. And then, only after there’s been a reasonable period for people to respond, do you start suspending services.
I’ve already written about how only fools would rush in and pour their lives into Google+. Seems I was right.
So here’s what I reckon should happen.
- Forward me a copy of the email from last week where you indicated that there might be a problem. That seems to have gone astray. Note here that I’m giving you the opportunity to lie and pretend that you did actually send such an email and that you didn’t simply act like cunts and suspend service.
- Apologise. Profusely. Your behaviour is offensive and you need to make amends. Yes, my behaviour is offensive too, but I’m the aggrieved party. Your first customer service challenge is to reduce my anger. It’s about time Google learned how to do customer service anyway.
- You fix the entire workflow for notifying people about name problems.
- For a start, that first suspension notice should offer more choices than just “Edit your name”. You know, maybe the name is right and you’re wrong.
- Actually, before that, suspension should not be your first action. Fix that. Cunts.
- Get rid of this stupid “must have two names” rubbish.
Now there’s this other whole thing about not allowing people to use screen names and other pseudonyms. That’s pretty fucked up too. But I reckon we’ve given you enough for one day, eh?
So, it turns out that Google+ isn’t really a social network service. Google chair Eric Schmidt reckons it’s an identity service. The battles of #nymwars will doubtless run for ages.
I’m sorry…& you’ll probably call me names for this, but…
Is the title correct?
The current title…
Should it be…
The…”not on”…just doesn’t make sense to me…”not OK”…makes more sense…am I wrong?…did I miss the meaning?…am I (dare I say it?) right?
Bug: The “smart”…”quote”…”replacer” fails when there is any char before an open quote or after a close quote: “works” .”<–fail” “fail–>”. .”<–fail–>”. I hate WordPress’s comment string replacer, I want the chars I typed not the “smart” versions…& an ellipsis should be 3 seperate dots not 1 char. I love the insta-preview tho!
Bug Followup: Ah, the “smart”…”quote”…”replacer” only fails during insta-preview, the posted version worked.
@Is the title correct? and @Bug Followup: I should call you names, yes, because you’re using a fake email address — in my goddam domain, if you please! — and two different entries in the name field when some sort of consistent identifier looks way less dodgy. But…
The title is correct. I wrote it. I should know.
If you’re not familiar with the usage “not on” for “not permissible” or “not a possibility”, with a sense of having transgressed social rules, all I can suggest is that it happens not to be common usage where you’re from.
It’s a much stronger statement that something being merely “not OK”.
I came here via “the register” website. I’ve read what you have to say and have to say I totally agree with you. I have not read the other commenters, I’m afraid because I’m sure they’ll be off topic quite a lot. Management that determines policy often overlooks the diversity in the world and we should not comply with what how they want us to be. Good on you.
Belatedly following. I’m not doing Google+ any more than I’m doing Facebook because I just don’t want to be that public. But I agree this sucks, and does nothing to change my non-participation.
And there’s another twist – if you have to provide your ‘real’ name, surely you should have to provide all of it? What if there’s already a John Smith or Susan Chang on Google+?
My parents in their wisdom (and in compensation for not having the 8 children the Catholic Church expected) endowed me with four given names. This means that in cases where I am required to provide my full legal name, I usually can’t. That includes my passports which both allow me three given names. That’s ok by my since I never use the fourth one by preference anyway. My driver’s licence only allows me two given names (which I don’t like at all). So the name in my passports is not the same as the one on my birth certificate or the one on my driver’s licence. Yet all of those documents can be used to ascertain my legal identity. I wonder which version Google+ would be willing to accept?
This whole episode made me decide to get my email away from Gmail – I spent last weekend setting up my own mail server, it’ll cost me $US 20 a month to hire the virtual server space.
I’m not going to say I’ll never use a Google product, but I certainly don’t want them running my mail, calendar or contact list any more (I’ve moved the last two over to Zoho for now). I deleted my Google+ account after two weeks, not because of this but because FB and Twitter give me all the networking I need right now.
But if Google are prepared to be this callous towards people with legal names that don’t fit the dominant convention in the USA, and also to those who don’t choose to reveal their legal names, then I really, really don’t trust them – even though I use my legal name online or a very similar handle.
Oh my god I might be in love! Love this post 🙂 but I have to say your mistake was in thinking you were the customer. My dear lad you are the product and your information goes to companies which are the customer.
Love the post.
This might possibly piss you off but Google+ just gained a new member called … wait for it…… “will.i.am .”. None other than Vic Gundotra the Google VP is advertising it:
https://plus.google.com/107117483540235115863/posts/iU84bBLaPXA
I haven’t responded to some of the recent comments here because I’ve been both busy and dealing with health issues alternately. But thank you all.
@Shantul Sharma: Thank you. I’d heard about the will.i.am thing, but it only pisses me off a little bit. It’s hardly the first time someone or some organisation has been so besotted with celebrity that they’ve ignored their own rules to help get their tongue even further up their arse.
Gundotra doesn’t even follow the rules himself, of course. My understanding is that Vic is not his wallet name. That kind of hypocrisy does piss me off. I daresay a further post on this point will soon appear.
@kim: You’re 100% right about is being the product and the advertisers being the customers. Someone made that point earlier in this long comment thread, I think. Or maybe it was just on Twitter.
Sorry for what you have been through and thank you for sharing. Your report saved me from the temptation of buying a Samsung Galaxy S II. Great hardware, but a spydroid in my pocket 24/7? No thanks, Google.
For a “global” company, Google just doesn’t get it.
For LOLz: Laurie & Fry (YouTube)
Oh by the way, Google are still at it: suspending someone for their 100% legal, government-sanctioned, birth name, which is an Indonesian mononym.
https://plus.google.com/103112149634414554669/posts/dLZoT7LEJWU?hl=en
Hi, Google employees! What will you do today about your company’s corporate racism?
I just cancelled my Google+ account (Nov 27, 2011) because of their stupid real name policy. I guess they wanted to make it easier for Government and non-Government stalkers to track us 🙂 . So, anyone who has a nom de plume or in my case, a nom de cyber, will not be able to use Google+. And no, I’m not going to send Google a “mother may I†letter. Well, I got news for Google, I don’t need your second failed attempt (Buzz was #1) at a social network, and I am in the process of cancelling my personal Gmail account. I’m thinking Yahoo or Yandex…yeah.
It’s not just that you don’t have two names. Someone over there has simply decided to make value judgments about the “authenticity” of people’s names, regardless of what their stated policy is. I’ve been using the name Dagmar d’Surreal (although mainly just Dagmar) everywhere that’s not going to be giving me a paycheck (not making myself unemployable, thanks) for about 20 years now. Maybe less than five percent of my friends even care whether or not they know my “real name”.
In December, Google+ decided my name is “inauthentic” and their communication with me about it has been one (count ’em, one) form letter from a “Calvin” who ironically does not appear to have a last name.
I can’t help but think they’re only managing to create a slightly more accurate system by which snobby people can try and invade other people’s privacy… without all those “inauthentic” names in the way.
@Dagmar d’Surreal: Sorry for the slow response — other matters have been the focus of my work lately — but you’re quite right. The most annoying parts of this entire matter for me? The policy said one thing — well, it said about three contradictory things — but then their actual practice indicated that they did something else. Their back-end systems didn’t support the policy or practice. And their entire customer “service” process was rude and ill-planned — though I wish to say on record, again, the individual staff were polite and did their best but eventually “the system” just gave up.
In your case, if you use the name Dagmar d’Surreal or just Dagmar in our interactions, then that is your “authentic” name as far as I’m concerned, because it’s the one I see with complete consistency. I have no idea where you reside, but in common-law countries that should be sufficient — though for many practical purposes a piece of paper is of course needed.
Any employer who’d not hire someone on the sale basis that their name is “a bit different” deserves a bullet in the head. But only two hours after the one in the gut.
Much here has been said of Australian law and getting the details right. I totally agree, but will point to the Australian Government who has issued my passport as belonging to Jorn Sanda. When I pointed out that is incorrect, they simple responded that “Australia doesn’t do umlauts”.
Curious to see if the platform for this environment will render my name with an umlaut…
@Jörn Sanda: I run this website on WordPress and it handles Unicode character sets just fine. The real problem is when the reader’s computer can’t handle it.
You might be my function designs. Thanks for that article