Hi Google, no, I haven’t forgotten about you

I met up with a friend yesterday, we went somewhere nice for lunch and then stayed on and had coffee and chatted about this and that. Incidentally, you may find it hard to believe but the guys serving there didn’t ask our names, and we didn’t ask for theirs either. Same goes for the bus driver who got me to town to meet her. It’s amazing how many people are willing to interact with me out there in normal life without demanding to know my full name. Very refreshing, after hearing the sort of stuff you’ve been saying.

But back to my friend – she was stunned when I told her about this new social networking site where the rules say people have to use their full real name or they might get thrown out. She was gobsmacked when I told her that you, Google, are saying that people aren’t allowed to use pseudonyms even if they have safety concerns.

She was utterly speechless when I told her that not only were you not allowing the very normal practice on the net of using pseudonyms, you were at the same time not allowing some people to use their real names because their real names don’t fit your pattern of what names should look like.

Oh, and you should have seen the look on her face when I told her about the proof of ID issue – when I told her that you have sometimes demanded that someone send you proof of ID by email, which is obviously completely open to Photoshop abuse, and then I told her about that guy who actually tested this procedure by sending you a totally obviously fake Hawaii driver’s licence and you accepted it…

Apart from this, we had a lovely afternoon. We went for a nice walk, and bumped into a couple I know from church and stopped for a chat – I know them as Robert and Sam, and have never thought to ask for their surnames, but somehow that has never been a problem. I have lived on this planet for nearly five decades now and have had so many conversations with so many people without knowing their full names and without them knowing mine. This is something I now realise I’ve always taken for granted: the freedom to interact with strangers and to choose how much information I share with them, to choose at what stage I feel it’s appropriate to give them my name, to exchange phone numbers or email addresses, etc.

And back in July, when I got the invite and joined Google Plus, I actually believed that you understood how important this is – you talked about circles and about being able to set who can see each of our posts and each bit of our profiles, you talked in a way that made me think: at last, after all those years of being subject to the whims of Mark “privacy is so last century” Zuckerberg, at last someone gets it, at last someone is showing respect for people’s privacy concerns. I was very excited, and started telling my friends on Facebook how great G+ is, I even got as far as getting one of those “I’ve moved to G+” profile pics for FB – but then I discovered that despite all this talk, in one particular (and to me very crucial) aspect you were actually no better than Facebook: you insist that everyone should use the names they are known by in real life, whether we like it or not, whether it’s safe for us to do so or not.

I’m not normally a fighter. I’m a middle-aged woman living a very low-key sort of life, I don’t have tons of energy, my days of going on protest marches and demonstrations are decades away, but this is an issue I feel very strongly about and I have no intention of shutting up about it.

This is my eighth “letter to Google” so far. I’d rather not have to keep writing them, I can think of other things to do with my time. But this stuff needs to be said. I can’t just stand by and let you ride roughshod over so many people, many of whom are already marginalised by society and therefore have a much greater need for a voice on the internet than those who can speak freely anyway. I intend to keep going on about this, and I hope that you will at some point soon take the ear plugs out and realise what damage this is doing to your reputation, and what this is likely to mean to your shareholders in terms of your bottom line figures. I’d much rather this happened soon, as I’d really much rather see G+ fulfil its potential than go down the drain. I think it’s a really good platform for interaction with strangers – or, rather, it would be, if it wasn’t for all these people being thrown out or being forced to use names they’re not comfortable using.

Please, Google, listen to the voice of reason. Stop the suspensions. Stop throwing out the very people who could be your ambassadors, the people whose goodwill you need in order to get the word round that G+ is a good place to hang out. You’re losing people’s goodwill day by day.

If, as I’ve heard it said, you want time to rethink your policy, then do the sensible and reasonable thing and stop the suspensions in the meantime! Each person who gets suspended costs you in goodwill and reputation. Each person who gets suspended has friends who are upset on their behalf, friends who will miss them on G+ and might, as some already have, leave in disgust.

Stop. Do your rethinking – you need to – but stop the suspensions in the meantime. This madness has gone on for too long already. Stop it now.