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Comment by mindstab | Hacker News Reader

Everyone is also missing the bigger point that Google's idea of a valid real name is incredibly north american and anglo centric. There are plenty of cases of people using their real names, be in European, or African or what ever and google still kicking them off.

Google's policies do not work, and are verging on racist.

I know some people who would be better off using a fake anglo name than their real name to keep using google+. That is defective.

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A golden oldie from Patrick:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

that just made my evening. thanks for sharing!

Great point -- although not everybody's missing it; it's gotten press in Australia (where Aboriginal names violate the policy), Hong Kong (where bloggers have complained about the ban on using both their English and Chinese names), and even in the US after Google suspended their own employee Ping.

I don't know. I think it's two different issues. One is an issue of policy the other is an issue of incompetence in implementing a policy.

Unfortunately, clumsiness in implementing security theater has privacy implications.

It's a policy that's nearly impossible to implement well on a global scale, though, at which point I think that blaming the policy is appropriate.

Do you have some examples of the cases you refer to?

Lennart Poettering pops to mind: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/google-doesnt-like-my-name....

Well, it seems that Google thinks "Poettering" must be a made up last name. Guess whatever they er, googled doesn't know who wrote that avahi code they're surely running.

http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/google-doesnt-like-my-name....

Ironically enough, Chinese residents in Hong Kong who do in fact go by Anglo names (an expression of their mixed cultural heritage in a former British colony) are getting systematically bounced:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=40356...

By some accounts, this is the reason for the odd "in one language" qualification in the Google Plus notions of what a "real name" ought to be. FWIW, there's at least one American-born Chinese who's gotten similar treatment: Ping Yee, who got bounced because someone insisted that his only Real Name (TM) was Ka-Ping Yee --- which is what it says on his birth certificate, but which no one (even family) uses much.

http://zestyping.livejournal.com/259131.html

What makes this one particularly odd is that Ping is a Google employee (or at least, he was at the time).

I suspect Anglosphere-born Chinese who go by "Alexa Chung", or whatever, aren't getting this level of systematic grief, but that only makes things more ridiculous: why should the acceptability of a name depend on where someone lives?

To be totally nitpicky, while Canada is in America, a lot of people might think that by "American-born Chinese" you mean "US-born Chinese", but Ping was born in Canada.

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