Tell HN: Google Plus doesn't like my name

[orp]

I just got an email from Google Plus telling me that I'm in violation of their Naming Policy.

Apparently, Google thinks my real name (transliterated from Hebrew) is a nickname. That's also the name, by the way, that appears on my passport.

I have no idea why Google thinks 'Or' is that odd of a name (I can't imagine that they took exception to my last name).

I've been warned that if I don't appeal the decision within 4 days, my Google Plus account will be suspended. Other than pressing an 'appeal' button of Google Plus, I couldn't find any way to provide 'further information', as requested in their email.

Comments: 1. Good work scaring your users, Google. 2. Facebook never had a problem with my name. 3. People at Google really needs to read this : http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ 4. On a further note on 3, Part of my day job is writing software for name identification. Trust me, My name is not all that odd.

Or

Notes: * Naming policy: http://support.google.com/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1228271

* Google email:

Hello,

After reviewing your profile, it appears that the name you entered does not comply with the Google+ Names Policy. Please log in to Google+ and visit your profile to learn more and take action.

The Names Policy requires that you use the name you are commonly referred to in real life in your profile. Nicknames, previous names, and so on should be entered in the Other Names section of the profile. Profiles are limited to individuals; use Google+ Pages for businesses and other entities.

If you do not edit your name to comply with our Names policy or appeal with additional information within four days of receiving this message, your profile will be suspended. While suspended, you will not be able to make full use of 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.

The Google+ team.

[patio11]

Sadly, Goooglers are not unaware of this issue. That's the trouble of problems with Google: at J. Random Megacorp this would be a stupid oversight. Multiple Googlers have brought up internally that this policy would result in them locking accounts of innocent users and they lost the argument. You're quite literally acceptable collateral damage of a core design goal of Google+: for strategic reasons, they want real identity relationships not "Internet identities" which may or may not be pseudonyms. They want Facebook names, not IRC nicks, and they're willing to backstop that with their famous willingness to use individualized customer service. These decisions were internally controversial but supported at the highest levels of the company.

[orp]

Oh, I realize that. I even agree with their reasoning.

I just don't like the fact that their algorithm is so bad that I came up as a false positive. Algorithms is the one place you don't expect Google to fail.

I mean, come on, the have thousands of my emails, my geolocation, my facebook profile is public, and they can't figure out Or is my real name?

[jrockway]

This is not true. Unfortunately, I can't elaborate further.

[jgrahamc]

I see things have improved little since the days when I couldn't have a Hotmail account with my real name (because "Cumming" is an offensive term) but I was able to register using the name Ivana Watch-Teenz-Screwing.

PS Went into my archives to check on this and discovered two things:

1. It was actually Ivana Watch-Teens-Give-Head and here are two screen shots that date back to April 2003 showing the denial of my real name and the acceptance of Ivana.

http://i.imgur.com/2bX2o.png

http://i.imgur.com/rO8Jp.png

2. In the same period Google used to serve pornographic ads against my name.

http://i.imgur.com/Z21O3.png

[hajrice]

Just out of curiosity, why did you register under "Ivana Watch-Teenz-Screwing" ?

[dhx]

Patrick McKenzie's article mentioned in comment (3) is very important. Most forms and procedures (paper and digital variants) apply unnecessary and incorrect restrictions to field values. The mistakes are carried all the way up into legislation where it is assumed that everyone has a permanent physical address.

Some other very common mistakes include assumptions that people:

* have a physical address

* have one physical address

* use a mobile phone

* use any sort of telephone

* can access the Internet

* use email

* know their mother's maiden name

* have had a pet at some stage

* attended a school (and other password recovery question options...)

* have an occupation

* have one occupation

* have a credit card

* have a bank account

* have 20:20 vision

* can read English and understand what is expected of them in a form

* know their own date of birth/age

* know their own name

* know their place of birth

* have money to print forms, send letters or make phone calls

And importantly, assumptions are made that people will will agree to provide information that is not required for the interaction/transaction.

Common sense usability is to not ask unnecessary questions or collect unnecessary data.

[alexchamberlain]

You should not assume that these assumptions are indeed assumptions. For example, banks want you to have a physical address, so they can track you down for debt.

UK readers... Please remember that students are 1 of the only groups to officially have 2 permanent addresses. Furthermore, it's illegal to collect unnecessary information.

[etfb]

Welcome to Nymwars. There's a reason Google+ has earned itself nothing but contempt from many quarters. Come back to Facebook; as long as you keep clicking their ads, they don't care what you call yourself.

[Karma_Police]

I've had a friend banned from facebook for using a nickname, instead of a real name. Facebook may not do it as often, or it may not be as publicized, but they do also have a real name policy in place.

[fauigerzigerk]

I had the exact same problem when I opened my Facebook account. The appeal worked smoothly though. I guess if there is any kind of name checking going on (which I find useless) these things are bound to happen.

[egypturnash]

This is why G+ is dead to me. Most of my friends like to use Funny Names On The Internet. And are also early adopters who LEAPT on G+ like starving orphans when it came out, only to find their accounts disabled.

So now the people watching me are mostly... dudes in Egypt who friend anything cute that comes up for a search of "Egypt+female". Who think a photo of their penis is an appropriate icon.

I went back to the rotting husk of LJ.

[willvarfar]

Fun tangent for the curious:

Odd is a not-unheard-of name in Norway http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_%28name%29

This can make introductions and hand-shaking with visiting English speakers amusing:

"Hello, I'm Odd"

[calibwam]

Even funnier, Even is another Norwegian name. Meeting two Norwegians, you can hear "Hello, I'm Odd" "And I'm Even!"

[troels]

Well .. I routinely have people questioning my name. Especially on internet forums.

[wilhelm]

http://my.opera.com/odd-even/blog/world-record-speed-test

[aestetix]

Sadly, there's not much hope. I hear it hasn't improved since my case:

https://plus.google.com/115896012705745653160/posts/Kdg2nPzM...

[kaens]

The exchange you had sounds very much like someone whose entire job is to sit around all day looking at rather trivial things like whether or not a profile is using a "real" or "common" name, and then going through a semi-scripted series of responses, of which 90% of their exchanges with individuals will be 90% the same.

I did some inbound "Tier-1" tech support, and some inbound and outbound call center work when I was a teen in the middle of nowhere, and similar situations would happen due to the sheer mind-numbing repetitiveness of the job and large amounts of really silly "results matter! get a trinket! smile!" managers who emphasized (due to the nature of the entire thing) quantity over just about anything else.

I wouldn't be too surprised if that's the case. It's ... one of the most disappointing things I can think of if it is.

[nsns]

I guess John Doe would work just fine though.

Google is very "Anglo-centric" in many of its products.

[Strallus]

That's not really surprising, because Google are an anglo-company.

(As in, the company was born-and-raised in America. Not talking about the colour of their workforce.)

Most companies work that way, even if they are multi-national. Take Apple's Siri, for instance. At first, Siri only had support for American English.

[wyan]

For this kind of thing (and others related to permissible content) I decided to delete my own Google+ account and Google profile. Now I have an old style account that works with their services (even Reader, although you can't share or comment any more), but without the big brother cr*p.

[pm24601]

Reminds me a little of xkcd: http://xkcd.com/488/

[Use your real or fake name]

          |                                    |

        (fake)                               (Real)

          \/                                   \/

[You put your content on [You put your content on google+]

your wordpress blog] |

           \/                                   \/

                     [Google G+ flags your account]

           |                                    |

          \/                                   \/

[You create a new fake account] [You spend days desperately trying to get something back]

                                                \/

                                          [Google ignores you because you are not well-known.]

                                                \/

                                          [You create a new fake account]

Violet Blue had her account flagged as not being real.

First Name: "Violet" - well my niece is named Violet. Last Name: "Blue" - as in Allen Blue (Co-founder of LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ablue )

This is why I refuse to use Google+ the flowchart only leads to account being banned. I am moving more and more content off of google systems simply because Google has this ban policy that puts content at risk.

On the other hand if you don't sign up to Google+ then your content hosted is less at risk. However, soon I am sure this will not be an option. Try to sign up for a gmail account now to see what I mean.

[rwhitman]

Well, you are in the unfortunate position of having a name that would be easily confused for an attempt at SQL injection.

I wonder if folks named "Insert", "And", "Where", "Not" etc would have similar problems...

[Random_Person]

My name is Chevee.

Google that. I'm pretty sure I'm the only one. I've not been targeted. I don't know how my name could be any less "common" and yet I am ignored?

This begs the question on how arbitrary this process is. Do you have to have a certain level of "popularity" before they decide to investigate? Is it just a bot crawling their DB looking for "uncommon" names?

[skrebbel]

Chevee isn't a word. Or is. Google thinks that the guy entered a sentence. Or something.

[md2perpe]

In Norway, both Even and Odd are normal names.

[md2perpe]

Also, my grandmother has Lick as one of her two surnames, and I've met a family called Suck (although not pronounced as in English, but with a Swedish u-sound, similar to oo in book).

[Shank]

The only real routes I can see are:

1) Scan passport & send that to Google 2) Change your name to the Hebrew variety and set the transliterated name as your primary yet alternate name

There are huge privacy implications for the first route, however, and @aestetix has a good point in that post about deletion policies and such.

At least they aren't going to kill your Gmail account.

[tripzilch]

> There are huge privacy implications for the first route, however

In the Netherlands, when you want to request (removal of) your data as per our privacy and person registration laws, you need to send a scan of your passport or ID card as proof of identification to the data-collecting corporation as well (which makes sense).

Fortunately you can block out and mangle large parts of this scan and they still have to accept it. It's not waterproof, but:

- you can block out or blur your photograph

- same for your social security number and the passport serial number

- place coloured letters diagonally over the scan stating that "THIS SCAN IS INTENDED TO PROVE MY REAL NAME TO GORGLE PLUS yyyy-mm-dd" (so that whoever receives it cannot use the scan for a different purpose)

Source: https://pim.bof.nl/gebruikers/geef-niet-meer-dan-nodig/ [Dutch]

[pm24601]

"The only way to win this game is not to play" - "Joshua" war games

The real route is to not use Google+

[adib]

Maybe you can just key-in your name with hebrew characters? That'll teach them.

[d4v1dv00]

I been through this, how I did was I told Google that I am sensitive to being found for fraud and phishing, then they allow me to use single letter as my last name. LoL

[willvarfar]

Hmm that could be parsed as you wanting a fake name to embark on fraud and phishing with ;)

[mmmooo]

Not even that uncommon in their scope:

select count() from profiles where first_name='or';

+----------+ | count() | +----------+ | 839 | +----------+

(out of dataset of ~40mil g+ users).

[aptwebapps]

Do you have access to a database of G+ users or is your post hypothetical?

[joeblau]

Based on my previous experiences trying to get help from Google, you're pretty much screwed. Just make your name a fake name.

[MLMcMillion]

Who cares? It's Google Plus.

[droithomme]

It's a racist policy. Common white names are accepted. Certain categories of "ethnic" (non-white) names are not. We also know it's intentional. Google has no intention to change. Draw your own conclusions from this. Case closed.