How It All Went Down
Here's a timeline of this morning with Google. Please note that although the times look precise, they are estimates; it's just that some events are packed close together, so I had to guesstimate some things with odd specificity.
Earlier speculation suggested that Picasa would go down with a suspended Google Profile, now that the two were linked. If this was the case earlier in the field test, it does not appear to be true now, as my Picasa seems to be entirely intact and accessible. (There's some weirdness with photos that were shared on Google Plus first, but that's to be expected, and I'm going to look at that a bit more.)
(I know that Google Reader has been reported to go down, but I don't use it, so I can't verify. Same with Google Buzz.)
ETA: Also, basic functions like Gmail and Google Talk and all that are intact. I knew that they would be, based on previous reports of suspended accounts, but I realize that not everyone will have been keeping up with that.
On the other hand, in the wake of bad publicity on this issue, Google has said that they will be making changes to the way they suspend profiles:
Moreover, I am not in violation of the policy as set out by Google in that:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skud (suspended twelve days and counting).
- 9:30 a.m. I have trouble posting to a friend's post on Google Plus. I send feedback for the issue, thinking it to be a bug.
- 9:40 a.m. After reloading the page, and trying to add a comment in my stream and on the psot page, I only vaguely recall, from following this issue very closely, that this is the first symptom of profile suspension. I check my profile page, and my account has been suspended.
- 10:02 a.m. I take a screencap and upload it to my Picasa.
- 10:04 a.m. I post a screencap of my suspension to my Dreamwidth.
- 10:05 a.m. I submit my profile for appeal.
- 10:10 a.m. yomikoma posts my suspension on Google Plus. I receive a Google Plus notification of having it shared with me. I'm not sure how exactly this happened, since it shouldn't be strictly possible to "mention" a suspended user in a post. Regardless, feel free to share his post if you have it, or repost this on your own. ETA: Actually, if you want to share something on Google, share my earlier post, since it has my statement about my name, as well as my "Banned from Google" filk, which is now even more apropos.
Earlier speculation suggested that Picasa would go down with a suspended Google Profile, now that the two were linked. If this was the case earlier in the field test, it does not appear to be true now, as my Picasa seems to be entirely intact and accessible. (There's some weirdness with photos that were shared on Google Plus first, but that's to be expected, and I'm going to look at that a bit more.)
(I know that Google Reader has been reported to go down, but I don't use it, so I can't verify. Same with Google Buzz.)
ETA: Also, basic functions like Gmail and Google Talk and all that are intact. I knew that they would be, based on previous reports of suspended accounts, but I realize that not everyone will have been keeping up with that.
On the other hand, in the wake of bad publicity on this issue, Google has said that they will be making changes to the way they suspend profiles:
We’ve noticed that many violations of the Google+ common name policy were in fact well-intentioned and inadvertent and for these users our process can be frustrating and disappointing. So we’re currently making a number of improvements to this process - specifically regarding how we notify these users that they’re not in compliance with Google+ policies and how we communicate the remedies available to them.Please note that this post was made last week; given Google's timescale of betas and other testing, "currently making" could simply be Google weasel words for "it might happen someday probably." One week after this statement, my profile was suspended without warning, or even notification.
These include:
- Giving these users a warning and a chance to correct their name in advance of any suspension. (Of course whenever we review a profile, if we determine that the account is violating other policies like spam or abuse we’ll suspend the account immediately.)
- At time of this notice, a clear indication of how the user can edit their name to conform to our community standards (http://www.google.com/support/+/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1228271)
- Better expectation setting as to next steps and timeframes for users that are engaged in this process.
Moreover, I am not in violation of the policy as set out by Google in that:
- I use a first and last name in a single language (though, seriously, there are some really, really fucked up, and frankly racist assumptions behind that "single language" clause).
- My name contains no unusual characters (it never occurred to me to use a period to represent the generally mononymic "Tablesaw" as "Tablesaw .", which got users like Sai and Skud in trouble).
- My profile and name represent one person (especially so, since "Tablesaw Tablesawsen" is unique while the name that my coworkers call me is not).
- And I do not use the name of another individual (though, as above, if I used the namey name my coworkers call me, I would be doing so; I don't even need to run any type of search to verify this because I WAS NAMED AFTER MY FATHER)
skud (suspended twelve days and counting).
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I say that because your other points are strongly in your favor. Especially the "single language" clause, which is frankly just idiotic. There was an RA in my dorm my freshman year whose first name was Indian (as his parents were from India), whose last name was Portuguese (as they were from the coast of India that had been a possession of Portugal for a while), and whose middle name was English (as they wanted to give him a "normal" name in case he ever wanted to go by that). I recall him being somewhat conflicted about what this all said about his identity—I think he particularly hated his middle name—but in any case he'd be more conflicted than Google, who seems 100% certain that his name wouldn't be allowable. I've also gathered that many Taiwanese parents give their children both a Mandarin name and an English name (for instance, my grad-school classmate Pai-Fang Hsaio went by "Franny", at least when she started grad school; "Franny Hsaio" seems to pretty clearly be in two different languages). All of this isn't some sort of letter-of-the-law rules-lawyering; I don't even know what else they could mean.
(Well. They could mean "two different writing systems", so that you don't give your first name in Roman and your last name in Cyrillic. In which case they should have said so.)
What makes this even worse is that that policy you link to explicitly observes that "pseudonymous" is a method of identification that Google often allows, with a link to a page on which they're even more explicit about how important it can be to have a consistent online identity that isn't linkable to your offline life. (Also there's a screenshot of Google search displaying the login identity "Melissa Garcia", which looks to me like it's in two different languages—Greek and Spanish, no?)
Meanwhile, I'm not even sure what would happen if I tried to sign up for a Google+ account with my real name, since I've been using "Henry Harper" on my Google account for ages as a kind of vague nod to anonymity. If I used my real name, would they suspend it and send mail to Henry Harper telling him to stop impersonating someone else?
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But yes, it's a valid point.
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