You may not run an account that presents itself as a person, group, or organization it is not. That covers a profile built from somebody else's name, picture, or affiliation, put together so that readers take the account for them. You are not required to use your own name or your own photograph here, and going without either one breaks nothing. What is prohibited is wearing somebody else's.
Nothing is screened before it is posted. No software compares profiles or checks anybody's name against anything, and nobody looks through the accounts of people nobody has reported, so a report is how this reaches us. A person reads every report, and we review reports within 24 hours of receiving them.
Impersonation is running an account that presents itself as an existing person, group, or organization that it is not. What decides it is what the account shows: their name, their photograph, their logo, a stated affiliation they never gave, or posts written as though they wrote them, with nothing on the account saying otherwise. Deceptive identities are the same thing pointed at a person who does not exist: someone else's photograph, or a generated face, presented as your own, together with claims of affiliation that are not true. Both are prohibited here.
This rule turns on what the account puts in front of a reader, because that is the part a person reading a report can see for themselves. A name shared with somebody famous is not impersonation. A photograph that is not of you is not impersonation on its own either. What breaks this policy is an account assembled so that it reads as a particular person or organization it is not.
Pseudonymous accounts are permitted. You do not have to put your real name or your own face on your profile, and you do not have to give a reason for that. Some of what is written here is written about a family, and the person writing it needs a name their family will not recognize in order to write it at all. That is allowed, and it is not a deceptive identity: a name that hides you is not a name that claims to be somebody else.
Accounts on Goodbye App may have similar names or similar pictures. Two accounts sharing a name and nothing else do not break this policy. Names are not owned here, and a common one is not a claim on anybody.
Writing on behalf of someone who has died does not break this policy either. If you are answering, closing, or keeping an account for a person who is gone, say who you are when you write, and that is enough. Signing your own name under theirs is the opposite of what this policy is about.
Nor does writing in another person's voice, where a reader can see that is what you are doing. A letter written as your mother might have written it, and given to your children as that, is a thing people have always done, and this policy is not aimed at it.
A parody, fan, or commentary account is permitted where the account itself says so:
An account that does both of those is not impersonating anyone. An account that carries a person's name and face and says nothing of the kind is what this policy prohibits.
Any user with a Goodbye App account has the ability to report potential violations of this policy.
In-app and Desktop
You can report content for review in-app and desktop as follows:
When you violate this policy, the penalty depends on various factors, including the severity of the violation and your past record of rule infractions.
Profile modifications:
Permanent suspension:
What this policy is for: people write here to be recognized by the few people they are writing to. An account wearing somebody else's name and face gets in the way of that. Nothing is screened before it is posted, so if you see it here, report it, and a person will read the report.