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from the arrows-buy-ennui-utter-gnome-our-crust-as-wheat dept.
According to the Google+ Page, Google is finally giving up on forcing everyone to user their real names to join Google+.
When we launched Google+ over three years ago, we had a lot of restrictions on what name you could use on your profile. This helped create a community made up of real people, but it also excluded a number of people who wanted to be part of it without using their real names.
Over the years, as Google+ grew and its community became established, we steadily opened up this policy, from allowing +Page owners to use any name of their choosing to letting YouTube users bring their usernames into Google+. Today, we are taking the last step: there are no more restrictions on what name you can use.
We know you've been calling for this change for a while. We know that our names policy has been unclear, and this has led to some unnecessarily difficult experiences for some of our users. For this we apologize, and we hope that today's change is a step toward making Google+ the welcoming and inclusive place that we want it to be. Thank you for expressing your opinions so passionately, and thanks for continuing to make Google+ the thoughtful community that it is.
I know many folks that refused to join Plus, just because of the restrictions and the fact that they *cough* suggest you to anyone in your contacts. They've given up on youtube comments, app store ratings, and a dozen other things that require Plus accounts.
Some might now join, though most probably won't simply because Google was so darn stubborn about this for so darn long.
What say the Soylentils?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 16 2014, @05:53PM
"Now anyone that wants to use a fake name without getting das boot"
Maybe they were just overwhelmed by child verification of 13+ year olds. I went thru that a few months ago. So my son meets their legal age requirements but doesn't have a "real ID" drivers license or whatever it was they required, and I'm not insane enough to let my son scan and mail some random internet company his official certified birth cert (who's dumb enough to do that, anyway?). And he doesn't have a credit card which is probably good. So he had to use my CC under my name. Interesting business model to collect 50 cents or whatever it was per person.
My guess is he's on file at the mighty GOOG as being an alias of mine although he really is just a real living teen boy.
I'm convinced the whole program, aside from revenue generation, is a privacy experiment. When GOOG decides I'm a 3 year old and threatens to close my account, they can financially experiment, via A/B testing, will this idiot give us a scan of his birth cert or drivers license or is privacy worth 50 cents to him? How about $5?
You only have to be 13 to have a GOOG account. Short of having an account open for at least 13 years I donno how to make myself immune to that other than giving up privacy or spending money...