Google Plus Account Suspended or Deleted Without Warning Due to Real Name Policy?


We have posted couple of articles about google plus business pages and warning about google plus profile deletions.

We’re pretty much sure you would have heard about the google plus real name controversy that caused some google plus accounts suspended which also caused other services like gmail, docs, etc., got blocked and unusable. The issue was discussed was all over the social media and most of the people were unhappy about the google’s real name policy and not allowing pseudonyms.

There was a lot of confusion among the google plus users, so to clear the confusion, google has created a document that outlines and explains google’s policy about name and google profiles. Please read Your name and Google profiles to learn more about the policy.

Meanwhile Robert Scoble discussed about the issue with Google’s Vic Gundotra and shared the following details on google plus

I talked with Google VP Vic Gundotra tonight (disclaimer, he used to be my boss at Microsoft). He is reading everything we have written about names, and such. Both pro and con.He says he is making some tough choices and that he will be judged over time how those choices turn out.He says that he is trying to make sure a positive tone gets set here. Like when a restaurant doesn’t allow people who aren’t wearing shirts to enter.He says it isn’t about real names. He says he isn’t using his legal name here. He says, instead, it is about having common names and removing people who spell their names in weird ways, like using upside-down characters, or who are using obviously fake names, like “god” or worse.He says they have made some mistakes while doing the first pass at this and they are learning. He also says the team will change how they communicate with people. IE, let them know what they are doing wrong, etc.I pushed him to make more of the changes, like give us a good appeals process, etc.He also says they are working on ways to handle pseudonyms, but that will be a while before the team can turn on those features (everyone is working hard on a raft of different things and can’t just react overnight to community needs).After running through his reasoning, mostly to have a nicer, more personal, community, I feel even stronger that Google is on the right track here even though I feel they weren’t fair or smart in how they spun up these new rules, but Vic convinced me to hang in there and watch their decisions over the next few weeks.I am on board and it will be interesting to watch Vic and his team. Me? I am having a ton of fun here and that is most of what counts.

The reason we are writing this article is,

to see if any of your accounts got suspended and what did you feel about it?

What could have been done to handle this in a much better way?

We also like to hear your personal view about the real name policy?

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