UPDATE: Google Kills Profile of Female Engineer on Google+ Adafruit’s Limor “Ladyada” Fried

Computers & Mobile
UPDATE: Google Kills Profile of Female Engineer on Google+ Adafruit’s Limor “Ladyada” Fried

Pt 101355-1

Limor was getting ready for the electronics show and tell tonight and Google suspended her profile. For “violating Google’s Community Standards” – Here’s a note from her…

Google suspended my Limor Fried “Ladyada” Google+ profile, no show-and-tell tonight… It’s my real name, a picture of me – my posts and my nickname. I made sure it wasn’t “Adafruit Industries” and specifically me when google asked people to only use real names in their profiles.

I was going to post here on MAKE with details on her weekly electronics show-and-tell (previous article here) – but the show-and-tell is canceled this week, sorry folks – the Ask an Engineer show will still go on as usual.

UPDATE: Limor tells me she is now able to view her profile again, the Google+ gods have brought her back from the dead!

92 thoughts on “UPDATE: Google Kills Profile of Female Engineer on Google+ Adafruit’s Limor “Ladyada” Fried

  1. UPDATE: Google Kills Profile of Female Engineer on Google+ Adafruit’s Limor “Ladyada” Fried Anonymous says:

    There has to be a valid reason for this — maybe the WIRED magazine logo in the image?  I haven’t looked deep enough into the allowable/not allowable content related to Google+ but I’m wondering also if the nickname may be a part of the problem?

    1. Anonymous says:

      it’s not the WIRED cover and it’s not the nickname – WIRED did not complain about the photo, in fact they’ve given permission for anyone to do stuff with it (it’s a poster in a few hacker spaces now) – it’s also not the nickname since her full name was in the profile.

      1. UPDATE: Google Kills Profile of Female Engineer on Google+ Adafruit’s Limor “Ladyada” Fried Anonymous says:

        Well, I’m all out of guesses.  That really stinks, too, because I’m starting to like Google+.  Hopefully they’ll be able to explain this and enable her profile again.

  2. UPDATE: Google Kills Profile of Female Engineer on Google+ Adafruit’s Limor “Ladyada” Fried Anonymous says:

    There has to be a valid reason for this — maybe the WIRED magazine logo in the image?  I haven’t looked deep enough into the allowable/not allowable content related to Google+ but I’m wondering also if the nickname may be a part of the problem?

  3. UPDATE: Google Kills Profile of Female Engineer on Google+ Adafruit’s Limor “Ladyada” Fried Anonymous says:

    There has to be a valid reason for this — maybe the WIRED magazine logo in the image?  I haven’t looked deep enough into the allowable/not allowable content related to Google+ but I’m wondering also if the nickname may be a part of the problem?

  4. Chris Rojas says:

    wtf google? not cool!

  5. Denise * says:

    Lesson learned: use your own d**n platform. 

  6. Esse says:

    Hi Phillip, on another MAKE thread I posted about Google+ and I said that we as hackers should work to provide our own infrastructure instead of relying on Google+, we should use P2P social media options like diaspora and if they aren’t good enough, we as a community should work together to make this possible. My comment (from a different account) was “disappeared” and so was my subsequent partial repost of the comment.

    What has happened here (not the censoring of my comments, but the censoring of ladyada) is a clear example of what I was warning against, if you don’t control your own information you will not have power over it and people can do you harm in terms of time, effort, and information disclosure. If we cannot host our software, our own site, on infrastructure that we get for free, pay for, have a deal to use, etc. then we are not free. We are shackled.

    I really want to emphasize this point as freedom is important to Maker. Google+, facebook, twitter all shackle us, we are not free, we are subject to their whims and it is up to us as Makers to MAKE something to enable us the freedom to say and do what we want while still maintaining control over what information we do choose to share.

  7. Esse says:

    Hi Phillip, on another MAKE thread I posted about Google+ and I said that we as hackers should work to provide our own infrastructure instead of relying on Google+, we should use P2P social media options like diaspora and if they aren’t good enough, we as a community should work together to make this possible. My comment (from a different account) was “disappeared” and so was my subsequent partial repost of the comment.

    What has happened here (not the censoring of my comments, but the censoring of ladyada) is a clear example of what I was warning against, if you don’t control your own information you will not have power over it and people can do you harm in terms of time, effort, and information disclosure. If we cannot host our software, our own site, on infrastructure that we get for free, pay for, have a deal to use, etc. then we are not free. We are shackled.

    I really want to emphasize this point as freedom is important to Maker. Google+, facebook, twitter all shackle us, we are not free, we are subject to their whims and it is up to us as Makers to MAKE something to enable us the freedom to say and do what we want while still maintaining control over what information we do choose to share.

    1. Anonymous says:

      Except diaspora is dragging it’s ass. The shit is quickly becoming vaporware.

      1. Sean McBeth says:

        It’s never going to happen. This is why I didn’t give them any money during their Kickstarter. Diaspora is an idea that developers with several decades of experience would have trouble implementing. They are raw, just-graduated college students. They’re barely employable in the rest of real industry and people basically threw money at them for a pie-in-the-sky idea.

        1. Anonymous says:

          Sadly I suspect you are correct. :/

        2. Anonymous says:

          Sadly I suspect you are correct. :/

        3. Adrian Lodge says:

          While I can’t comment on Diaspora, I feel your comment about “barely employable.. just-graduated college students” is a little unfair.

          Maybe I’m just saying this because I am one but it seems that industry sometimes forgets that if they won’t employ us, we don’t get the experience..

          Furthermore, if this is due to the fact that they need to differentiate between ever-increasing numbers of graduates, then perhaps it is time that Universities or Governments reduced the money funding academia and give an equal focus to the more creative, vocational skillset.

          1. Sean McBeth says:

            My point is that, most kids coming out of a computer science degree program, think they’re going to get a job leading a project and writing tons of code. That’s the worst place to put such a person. You just don’t have the experience yet to be able to be a lead programmer. And *most* companies, by virtue of not being a place like Google or Microsoft where they can afford to have extra people, need everyone to be a “lead” on some project.

            It’s not just coding, it’s coding in the business environment. It’s so completely different from academia, and can be vastly different from other businesses depending on what industry you go in to. Maybe 25% of your day-to-day work is going to be the math and computer science disciplines that universities tend to focus on–and it’s important, it’s absolutely required, the people who say otherwise don’t know what they’re missing. The other 75% is making decisions for a feature that needs to be delivered today that will impact the entire project for the next two years. When is a hack okay, and when do you take the time to Do It Right? That’s why you’ll get interview questions asking you if you work on your own side projects. We need to know if you’ve ever had to make a decision you’ve lived to regret. THIS is what is not taught, and impossible to teach, in the university setting. 

            Some universities try to give the students a “larger” project to work on to get a taste of this, and it’s still a tiny, toy project compared to what you’ll end up working on in industry. Because it’s only an hour or two block out of your day, because you have other classes to attend. And it’s only in a four month shot, maybe 8 if it’s a dual-semester project, instead of the next 36 months of your life. And it’s easy to dump the project when it gets unmanageable, because nobody is trying to make money off of that time investment.

            Knowing how to program is like knowing how to swing a hammer and push a saw: it’s all well and good, but where do you swing the hammer and where do you push the saw? It’s so very little of the process.

            This is why I say “barely employable”. You have the prerequisites to start learning to be a programmer, and only you have those prerequisites because they don’t come easily any other way, but you’re not a programmer yet. It’s not your fault, it’s just a time issue. It’s not that industry *won’t* employ you, it’s that in many cases they *can’t* employ you. I can’t hire someone I can’t count on to work without me running herd on them. Maybe a startup is willing to take a risk on you because they can get you cheap, and maybe a giant corp is willing to take a risk on you because they can amortize your costs, but there is a huge middle ground of small- to medium-sized businesses that cannot take the time to train you.

        4. Adrian Lodge says:

          While I can’t comment on Diaspora, I feel your comment about “barely employable.. just-graduated college students” is a little unfair.

          Maybe I’m just saying this because I am one but it seems that industry sometimes forgets that if they won’t employ us, we don’t get the experience..

          Furthermore, if this is due to the fact that they need to differentiate between ever-increasing numbers of graduates, then perhaps it is time that Universities or Governments reduced the money funding academia and give an equal focus to the more creative, vocational skillset.

      2. Esse says:

        status.net and indenti.ca both work. I’m not sure about any p2p functionality in status.net but certainly it would be possible. Let me be clear, we must make it.

        1. Sean McBeth says:

          I have learned to be suspicious of anyone who tells me we “must” do something.

      3. Esse says:

        status.net and indenti.ca both work. I’m not sure about any p2p functionality in status.net but certainly it would be possible. Let me be clear, we must make it.

    2. Anonymous says:

      Except diaspora is dragging it’s ass. The shit is quickly becoming vaporware.

  8. Anonymous says:

    And now your links in post to G+ posting are coming up 404!
    I still find it under Phillip Torrone posts (https://plus.google.com/110555297068667896528/posts)
    and a number of people have been sharing it.
    Bad Google!  Evil Google!

  9. Anonymous says:

    And now your links in post to G+ posting are coming up 404!
    I still find it under Phillip Torrone posts (https://plus.google.com/110555297068667896528/posts)
    and a number of people have been sharing it.
    Bad Google!  Evil Google!

  10. Major _ says:

    Diaspora! Someone give me Diaspora! I’m sick of Facebook and Google overlords!!!

    1. Anonymous says:

      It may never be workable.

  11. Arno Brosi says:

    I guess that they objected with the Adafruit industries being such a large part of the profile.

    1. Anonymous says:

      really? the profile says

      ==============================
      Introduction
      Limor Fried (ladyada) founder & engineer. Adafruit makes all-original DIY electronics kits – is a New York
      City based company that sells kits and parts for original, open source
      hardware electronics projects featured on http://www.adafruit.com as well as other cool open source tronix’ that we think are interesting and well-made.
      OccupationOpen source hardware and DIY electronics==============================out of all the profile i’ve seen i think this one is clear it’s 1) limor and 2) isn’t just about her company.

    2. Anonymous says:

      really? the profile says

      ==============================
      Introduction
      Limor Fried (ladyada) founder & engineer. Adafruit makes all-original DIY electronics kits – is a New York
      City based company that sells kits and parts for original, open source
      hardware electronics projects featured on http://www.adafruit.com as well as other cool open source tronix’ that we think are interesting and well-made.
      OccupationOpen source hardware and DIY electronics==============================out of all the profile i’ve seen i think this one is clear it’s 1) limor and 2) isn’t just about her company.

      1. anomdebus says:

        FWIW, her site appears to be up again and the “About” page is empty.

      2. anomdebus says:

        FWIW, her site appears to be up again and the “About” page is empty.

  12. Stephen Carr says:

    this seems to match a trend.  google+ is STILL a limited beta, and they are trying to find the line between fair and safe.  ATM they are over-filtering.  son they will underfilter, then when it gets “just right” they will open the beta.

    it IS still a closed beta people, don’t think of it as anything other than that.

  13. kevix says:

    the network effect of floss social media are less than the others, and for a business that is not limited to the floss world, they need to be find-able,  thus they’re needing to be on google+ vs diaspora or status.net.

  14. Sean McBeth says:

    It’s a blanket ban on non-letter characters (well, they allow things like apostrophes for names like O’Brien). Basically, putting her nickname in quotes what triggered it. This has happened to a lot of people. As soon as they removed the quotation marks, they were okay. It’s something to do with the search algorithms choking. Not that that makes it any better, but it’s nothing ideological.

    1. Anonymous says:

      google can’t stop a ” being entered in a form?

      1. Anonymous says:

        To be fair, it could be some form of security-by-obscurity spam reduction mechanism – allow bots to put arbitrary characters in their names, but ban them afterwards.

  15. Sean McBeth says:

    It’s a blanket ban on non-letter characters (well, they allow things like apostrophes for names like O’Brien). Basically, putting her nickname in quotes what triggered it. This has happened to a lot of people. As soon as they removed the quotation marks, they were okay. It’s something to do with the search algorithms choking. Not that that makes it any better, but it’s nothing ideological.

  16. Kevin Groce says:

    Yah this happend to William Shatner:

    http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2388640,00.asp

    and Just as I am speaking her profile is back online…

    1. misan says:

      You don’t mean Mr. Shatner. Do you?

    2. misan says:

      You don’t mean Mr. Shatner. Do you?

  17. Glenn says:

    They deleted my account too. First suspended, then reviewed, then reconsidered, then suspended. I used my real name and had posted nothing. The only problem Was that their Last Name Field needed something to put into it, I chose an underscore character. My legal name is Glenn. I uploaded a copy of my drivers license and social security card showing my name. They deleted my account without ever giving any reason, all by automated process apparently.

  18. Gregg says:

    Well for me the product keeps complaining that it has exceeded its invite capabilities. What rot! However it is nice to know that Limor and profile is back from the dead.

  19. Rogi Riverstone says:

    google pus If I used my legal name, someone would find me and kill me. they’re putting women in danger. screw this.

    1. Anonymous says:

      Just because it puts you, personally, in danger does not mean it puts all women in danger. Perhaps others in a similar situation as well. The real name rule also applies to Facebook, even if they don’t do much to enforce it.
      While it is unfortunate that there’s someone out there who would seek to harm you, you shouldn’t generalize like that. (and for the record, while no one’s out to kill me, there is someone out to make my life a living hell)

  20. Dave says:

    Google giveth, and Google taketh away.

  21. Engineer Zero says:

    I’d like to think the luster on web 2.0 is beginning to dull and eventually people will go back to personal websites, albeit with more bells and whistles and user friendly interfaces than in the 1990s.  I so miss Geocities.

  22. Darcy Whyte says:

    At least she got her profile back. 

    With facebook I lost my profile and many important connections.

    Back up your contact lists!!!!!

    Google lets you do that. Facebook doesn’t. 

    More details: http://www.generalsocial.com/2011/07/google-vs-facebook/ 

  23. jazzinone says:

    And what did you expect for free?

    You got exactly what you paid for is all.

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