Jwz: Google's pseudonym support "obvious bullshit"
jwz.org
jwz.org
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.
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...
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?
http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/google-doesnt-like-my-name....
Why does online marketing have to be built around maintenance of a database of people's Real Identities® ? If it's a page full of comments about guitars, stick a Stratocaster ad on it and be done. The Internet was supposed to be about freedom and personal expression. I used to scoff at things like Second Life and people on BBSes with ridiculously fake avatars, but now we have the horrors of everyday life invading and taking over the "virtual" space, which is less and less virtual every day. Even the visual and auditory carnage of MySpace was preferable to the cookie-cutter sameness of Facebook, helpfully tracking your every single move before you even think to make it, and broadcasting the mundane minutiae of everyday existence to all your "friends".
I used to love Google when it first came out, it beat the pants off Alta Vista and it was a fantastic way to extract cool links from the vastness of the 'net. Now people log on to +1 each other on all the right topics and say all the right things and fit themselves into all the right pigeonholes. What if you want to go online not to maintain your identity as it is now, but to explore new ones? What if you need more than one identity? What if the whole notion of "identity" is something you find burdensome and ultimately repugnant? Well then, there must be something wrong with you and you must have something ghastly and awful to hide.
So yeah, fuck those guys.
Requiring your real name makes it easier for people you know in real life to find you.
Interactions with people who know you in real life will keep pulling you back in, because these people are harder for you to ignore.
Once you give your real name and the rest of your identity (they have been badgering for phone numbers for a while, to keep your youtube account, or open a google account, or to avoid annoying security/recovery notices when logging to gmail), you won't be asking yourself “should I be sharing this” questions, because you'll be in the habit of trusting them. Other features, like payments, deliveries and phone notifications, won't have to nag you for explicit personal info anymore.
So I think they will offer temporary or per-circle identities at most, while people who want privacy from Google or the US and affiliates will have to fake it while it remains possible, or be shown the door.
I still think there is a hugely underserved market in the social space, comprised of people like me, who don't want an extension of their real life identity to follow them around online. Hacker News is full of people I don't know, but interactions with all these people I don't know are plenty effective at pulling me back into the site.
Broadcasting it is one thing, recording it all is quite another.
I left to do my own thing but I email Larry and Sergey from time to time and so far they have been pretty cool about listening to me (they have a 747 or whatever it is, I have a Dodge Sprinter, sort of establishes the pecking order, I'm way way down on the list, so the fact that they sometimes listen is cool)
I think that Google wants to not be evil but the whole money thing kinda messes that up.
I also think that they listen. If you want Google to not be evil, it's a lot like wanting our government to not be evil. If you sit back and complain when they get evil, oh, well, that's what you might expect. If you apply pressure that says "hey! don't be evil, we liked that part!" you might be pleasantly surprised.
It's passive or not. If you are passive and unhappy with the results, try being more noisy, I think there are a lot of people that want to do the right thing but if the only noise they hear is from money people who want more money, well, they take care of those people. Make some noise.
They found me, I was fairly well known as a Linux perf guy at the time.
I worked on the beginnings of what became GFS.
I left pretty quickly, I really wanted to be doing my own thing.
Is it evil to put the interests of the entire network above the interests of a small minority? If you can say for sure, you're either an ideologue or you've solved the most fundamental problem of politics.
Personally, I think there's room on the spectrum for a variety of standards of identity. At one end there's 4chan, at the other carefully-vetted private communities. In the middle you've got sites that require a "real" e-mail address, or Something Awful charging $10 to join. Google's real names policy is distinctly flawed in execution, I think largely as a result of scale, but I don't think it's a fundamentally bad idea and certainly not categorically evil.
"If we knew that it was a real person, then we could sort of hold them accountable, we could check them, we could give them things, we could you know bill them, you know we could have credit cards and so forth."
http://gigaom.com/2011/08/29/its-official-google-wants-to-ow...
It's complete bullshit and flies in the face of history, not just what is "right."
Why not totally off-topic... Well, he also seems to use it so that he can focus on the person's actions in the descriptive context of the person's time/inventions which he has been using up to that point. See, if he brought in the well-known name early, then he well effectively be changing the subject from what he was talking about to what people know about the famous person. And that harms his attempt to show a new angle on the well-known person. This is Somewhat similar to a pseudonym allowing an position/argument to float free from the particular individual stating it, and thus be judged on its own merits.
Anonimity as "Certain Nickname on g+". Nobody knows his real name, but everybody knows his avatar and nickname and his real religious/political views. He has a certain credibility based on past facts. When I find hin irl, I'll kick his ass for insulting my believes.
No anonimity, as we "know exactly who he is". He always posts about mainstream music and funny catz. He is a joy, always contributing positively in our community.
How many people have a $GIVEN_NAME $FAMILY_NAME (in that order, with a neat space)?
How many people have a real name that doesn't fit those neat boxes? Your "small minority" is pretty insulting.
There's people's right not to have their name associated with stuff in public. Either because they've established a pseudonym they want to be associated with or they want to speak freely without risking harm to their career, family, etc... That's what I consider pseudonymity and that might take a while to implement.
Then there's straight up privacy. That's what he's talking about. The right for you not to be forced to share your name with Google when using a Google sponsored service.
I can understand why a person would be concerned with both but I consider both to be different things
But that's not what pretty much everyone pushing pseudonymity in this fight considers pseudonymity, so your distinction is not very helpful.
(Sorry, the unflinching confidence in your statement made the snarkyness irresistible to me)
I realize there's a spectrum to every debate and it's sometimes hard to know where the fringe is. But I have to assume most people realize Google has the right to know who they are providing a service to.
Again, I see the distinction here between Google knowing your name (which I think they have the right to do) and Google using your name to build a whole database on you (which I don't support). But these are all privacy issues.
Pseudonymity is about how you present yourself to the community at large and to the best of my knowledge it always has been. For example, Samuel Clemens published under Mark Twain but his publisher paid Samuel Clemens.
He's saying you can't have true Psuedonimity (as you, and Google define it) without complete privacy. If someone can scratch the surface of your psuedonym and find your real name then there's no real point.
By not getting a warrant but saying it's a matter of national security.
By fraudulently misusing your government id and claiming you have some right to the information.
That raises two questions though.
1) How prepared should a company be to _require_ a warrant before handing over any of your personal data? There's a big spectrum between "Yes Agent Smith, we'll have that data ready for you as soon as you come back with a warrant", and falling for the "Hi, it's Dave - whats the root password" kind of social engineering trick.
2) Should they store that information at all? What would DuckDuckGo+ look like I wonder? It'd be nice to have a "social network" where you have a high confidence that they can answer "Sorry Agent Smith, we specifically never store that data on any of our users - would you like to see the source code that proved we don't?"
A subpoena will do it.
What you're talking about is complete anonymity which is a different concept.
(Misrepresentation and misattribution aside.)
Rather than being something which provides all the protections of pseudonymity, such a 'masking' system would give further asymmetric informational advantage (and user lock-in) to Google.
Personally, I prefer to respect the work they've put into the product and to accept that they may have insights deeper than mine. It's evident from Google's announcement that they see more complex issues around pseudonyms, and I will form an opinion after I see their changes. I do not understand this attitude of "Fuck those guys" - so much anger over a social network!
I have no idea what such effects may be, I only allow for the possibility they exist.
Google may well have put all sorts of deep thought into it--but if they're just going to duplicate unliked features of a product that users merely tollerate without offering any real incremental value, why should they deserve to succeed?
Thoughtful analysis is far more useful than these sensationalist rants.
Google releases one product you don't like and people are "deserting" all their products. How childish can you get?
I agree, and I think this is probably the right thing for them to do. (Well, probably stop kicking people off, too.) And I think they're probably doing this in an attempt to allow people to better represent themselves in the ways that they choose, and more in line with how they can offline. I just wrote this today: http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/11670022371/intimacy-is-perfo...
meaning they're still fully prepared to roll over on you to authoritarian governments or advertisers at the drop of a hat.
I'm not sure what the suggestion is here. They should be prepared to flout the law? Or just not gather any of the information in the first place? What purpose would this have for them, in that case?
Seems fairly obvious that anyone who's really worried about authoritarian governments or advertisers shouldn't be using google products.
> I'm not sure what the suggestion is here. They should be prepared to flout the law?
Why would you draw that inference? JWZ seems to be presuming the opposite, i.e. that Google plans to comply with the law---and since they will have carefully collected legal names to go with every account, they can be maximally helpful to the authoritarian governments who want to track users down.
> Or just not gather any of the information in the first place?
This one. Or at least, if not "any of the information", maybe not gather all of the information. Permit users to associate their account with their established pseudonym and provide exactly as many RL details as they feel comfortable providing.
If a government wants to tie a Google account to a Real Name, they have plenty of options:
- get a history of IP addresses that accessed the account and contact the relevant ISPs
- track other Google accounts logged into from a similar pattern of IP addresses and see if there's a Real Name for any of them
- look at the content associated with the account (e.g. email), which may reveal the Real Name and/or give pointers to other services (e.g. Paypal) that might well have it
- if you use an Android phone with the Google account in question, Google can tie the account to a SIM and an IMEI. If the SIM is postpaid (or even prepaid in many countries), that will directly lead to a Real Name (note: authoritarian governments are very likely to require all SIMs be associated with a Real Name). Even if a prepaid SIM isn't directly associated with a Real Name, there still could be a payment trail for the SIM and/or top-ups ...
- probably other angles I haven't thought of yet
These are additional steps, but many of them are easy because they involve actors (e.g. ISPs, carriers, credit card processors) that are known for cooperating with governments (and sometimes even private actors like the MPAA & RIAA). Beyond that, anyone trying to tie a Google account to a Real Name is likely to do some or all of these things anyway to check whether or not you lied to Google.
Giving Google your Real Name for Google+ affects whether or not they can use it. If you're not happy with how Google is going to use your Real Name, Google+ isn't for you (and probably wasn't even without the pseudonym issue, since you have concerns about Google's business practices). Giving your Real Name to Google for Google+ doesn't meaningfully change whether or not a government (or other entity in a position to legally compel Google) can tie your Google account to a Real Name.
If you have not heard of National Security Letters,
>between 2003 and 2005 the FBI issued more than 140,000 specific demands under this provision -- demands issued without a showing of probable cause or prior judicial approval -- to obtain potentially sensitive information about U.S. citizens and residents.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03...
This one. Or at least, if not "any of the information", maybe not gather all of the information. Permit users to associate their account with their established pseudonym and provide exactly as many RL details as they feel comfortable providing.
Use a fake but real sounding name. Then use a pseudonym attached to it. Then provide exactly as many RL details as you feel comfortable. Why does it matter that the pseudonym is somehow canonical?
I understand they have identity plans. But as a user, I want the service to become more interesting, and I don't think they are doing us any favors.
That is, unless they write an algorithm that checks for "Dear realname" in your emails and compares it to your purported name & pseudonym. Yuck.
If you wanted to use the platform to protest against the government, or if you fucked the head of CIA's wife and he found out your g-mail address on her phone, you might be in deep shit.
1) The short, speculative rant is well-reasoned. If you disagree with his reasoning that Google saying it will take "months" to implement pseudonyms implies that their solution is significantly more complicated than simply "stop deleting accounts with names we don't like", it would be conducive to discussion if you explained your reasoning.
2) This short, speculative, well-reasoned rant is written by JWZ, whose insight and wisdom is held in wide regard by many, many people. He's earned the right to have his speculations taken seriously many, many times over.
Let's say there is a right way and a wrong way to do pseudonyms (empirical evidence: YouTube, HN).
You think Google would haphazardly enable them as JWZ proposes without making damn sure they had the best chances of it turning out the right way rather than the wrong way?
Larry Page thinks without Google+, Google is doomed in 10 years (I believe he said that in an interview recently). I think JWZ is vastly oversimplifying the careful testing that Vic and co. are putting into this. If you believed the company's livelihood depended on it, wouldn't you?
Larry Page thinks without Google+, Google is doomed in 10 years
I'm a google fan boy. I use apps, gmail, gae. Today I deleted my google+ account. So if Page thinks that without Google+, Google is doomed, why (to paraphrase Vilos Cohaagen) is he fucking making it happen?
Oh yeah, I forgot this was HN where infamy weighs higher than substantive posts. Just because someone is usually reliable doesn't mean you take their word without question.
If you think the post's brevity was a shortcoming, though, read this, which was linked from the OP: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/08/nym-wars/
That doesn't take first-hand knowledge to notice.
That's relevant speculation, regardless of whether he's right.
It is no secret that Google is a corporation. The only thing that matters to a corporation is to make money. Google doesn't spend millions on improving their search engine and developing a fantastic social networking service because of some altruistic motive. Don't be so naive as to expect companies like Google and Facebook to adhere to your idealistic views of privacy and anonymity if that means a reduction in profit.
Direct your energy to keeping the internet free. As long as we have that, we can represent ourselves however we like by being able to choose which services we use.
Gmail accounts can be effectively anonymous. Yet plus accounts cannot be?
Google does not need anyone's real name in order to track and advertise to them. I'm fine with google tracking and advertising to me. Assign me some arbitrary UID and give me a 20 year cookie you refresh whenever I load a page with adwords or visit plus or login to gmail. I've been fine with that, all along.
But requiring a real name, tells me that google doesn't just want to track me to advertise to me. They want to correlate my online activities with my offline identity.
I consider that a violation of my privacy.
And so, I'm removing myself from google. I'm setting up mail services elsewhere, I'm migrating my Google Apps and App Engine accounts to other services. I've stopped using Plus, and as I move things elsewhere I'm deleting them from google.
For me, they've gone too far, and I no longer trust them.
Hell, even their search results have been in steep decline lately, so DuckDuckGo, here I come!
PS-- I agree with jwz. The only reason that it would take months to implement is because they're using some authoritative method - maybe ISP customer info, or government supplied info- to correlate users to reveal real identity. I don't see this recent change as google actually relenting on the issue.
Google used to be the thing when it was a bare bones, super fast and accurate search engine. Nowadays trying to find an organic search result is getting very early-yahoo like. Just take an objective look at the search results for an even mildly-popular term and you'll find it buried under layers of ads and Google verticals like YouTube and others.
I'm envious of some of my friends who just skipped the entire social networking thing. They are gloriously offline if you try and find them. I got into social networking while working at a social networking startup, and now I don't really get much value from it anymore. But all my 'stuff' is out there, so closing the accounts now is somewhat superfluous and pointless. I think Twitter is about the only thing to use - you get to communicate but you really do get to control how much people get to know about you.
As for the comments about needing to be 'out there' as an entrepreneur - I've spent a token amount of SEO effort to get myself on front page search engine results - if people want to find me, they will. But the endless linked-in requests from people you've spoken too once via email - it's all getting very tedious.
The challenge is of course in 'winning' and decades of research on this shows that people who really want to win will be a bit evil if they can get away with it and win at the same time.
So what Google has is a competitive culture (for a long time you couldn't get a raise without getting a promotion) which is peer balanced. They have a huge toolbox of technologies that can generate cash when tweaked. And they have certain groups who's success criteria is 'can you make more cash this quarter than last quarter.'
Unless actively worked against, like mold in a bathroom, evil sort of emerges out of that environment. Kind of scary to watch actually.
However, once sold and listed, quarterly performance numbers start to permeate the entire organisation. As you say, the needs of making these numbers start to outweigh the don't be evil mantra. And, because the original services were set up with a 'trust us, we're not evil', the gains to be made from tweaking the 'evil' dial up, even just a tiny bit, are quite large.
I'm not surprised the rank and file are committed to the lofty ideals and goals, and they probably will continue to attract new recruits for the foreseeable future. But in order to keep committed to those types of goals, necessarily some profit is going to have to be foregone. That's mighty hard to do.
My guess is that the big event that makes people trust Google less is close, or maybe has even already been but hasn't been disclosed yet. To me, they're in the same kind of space that Microsoft was post-Windows 95 and pre-Windows 98. Everyone still likes them but questions are being asked. Legal intervention is around the corner.
I see privacy kind of like any economic externality. There's no (immediate) price on loss of privacy, so people are happy to trade it away for benefits like free email and social networking. Can you price privacy? Well, objectively we already are when we forgo private services for free ones. You could say we price our privacy at the cost difference between a free service and a paid one.
Also Google+ is being led by Vic Gundotra, who spent most of his career at Microsoft. Do relative newcomers to Google have the same passion about not being evil, and the same norms about what is/isn't evil?
It started as a one-engineer campaign, almost a joke. He'd write the motto on whiteboards in meeting rooms. It spread from there.
I think the heart was in the right place. It seems to have moved.
I don't think anyone believes them to be a charity or a non-profit, but if you could show how a billion dollars in the quarter was not collected (reducing their free cash flow from 2.8B$ to 1.8B$ for the quarter) because to do so would have required sharing 'too much' information about their user's browing habits, or what they stored, how they used AppEngine. They would get tremendous kudos and support from the community and Wall Street would mercillessly pummel them. I mean really, who wouldn't pick a billion dollars up off the floor?
That sort of wall street punishment would depress their stock price, and that would hurt the employees who feel 'better' when their stock options are worth something than when they are worthless. It is a vicious circle.
Remember the discussion in City Slickers [1] when Bruno Kirby's character tries to get Billy Crystal's character to admit he would cheat on his wife if the situation was 'right.' (and by right he generally meant there were going to be no consequences, no one would find out, etc etc.) And at the end Billy Crystal says "God would know." That was a wonderfully crisp treatise on integrity, and it illustrated, the difference between externally applied values versus internally upheld values.
It seems few people in life have the level of integrity that Billy Crystal's character shows, and so the process seems to boil down to keeping enough consequences in place so that employees won't violate a company value, and having the will to fire people who step over the line, even if the company benefitted from their action.
'Don't be evil' is, as many have pointed out, really too squishy to be actionable. But something like 'if you have to choose profit over privacy, choose privacy.' would be. Certainly not as catchy though.
It's very hard to figure out how much individual feature elements in a huge product or service earn or lose. It's similarly hard to put numbers on the damage to brand done by a privacy violation or breach of trust costs a company. Attempting to guide company ethics via financial metrics just leads to people finding loopholes in the math.
Historically this is precisely why Google has declined to provide any guidance at all. At the time Google starts being able to provide SEC-acceptable guidance on their income I would expect the creative people there will have left.
As WOPR would say, "The only way to win is to not play the game."
Okay, since there is a singular, "real" evil corporation, are the other non-real evil corporations in the imaginary-evil or fake-evil domain?
edit:
A bit cryptic, my point is that "evil" has been overloaded to meaninglessness. It decreases one's intelligence to use it in an assertion. In war and throughout history, party A asserts party B is evil, and party B asserts party A is evil. If party A is truly evil, then they would have no scruples over claiming party B is truly evil, and vice versa, analagous to the Liar's Paradox. Entering this frame, and debating who is "truly" the evil one, is a lens more likely to obscure than clarify.
An alternative heuristic for assessing the merits of actions: Coercion is considered polar to freedom by many social philosophers. Does party A use coercion to force party B into making a decision that leaves party B worse off?
Does google use coercion to drive user registration?
Does google use coercion to prevent deregistration?
Does google use coercion to damage competitors?
Does google use coercion to forcefully identify the anonymous?
No. No they don't.
"While you're logged in, YouTube will keep track of your viewing history, and use videos you’ve watched, videos you’ve liked, and your subscriptions to recommend other videos for you to enjoy. With 48 hours of video uploaded every minute, we’re sure to find you at least a couple more videos worth watching!"
Coercion isn't limited to the targets decisions, it can also be applied to their acts. Coercion isn't limited to physical coercion. I consider the persistent pestering for a phone number in gmail to be coercive. I consider repeatedly asking G+ users for government ID to be coercive.
The benefits of completly relying on google are minimal the potential costs are nontrivial.
I don't think they're any more or any less evil than other large company. But this is just about keeping them honest on an issue that is a very big deal with most of their customers.
Also I think most of these geeks are pretty smart and aware of what's going on around them.
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/10/to_reform_capitalism_ceos_sh...
I agree with the other poster that I normally see sane things written by you, so I don't totally understand where this is coming from. Moreover, why is this being held to the top of this comment section? (I guess the subject brings in people that agree) To respond:
First, it doesn't follow at all that the only reason to include a real name is to correlate online activity with your real life person. For instance, the reasoning could be exactly what they are saying it is.
Now, there's no reason to trust corporations (large or small, startups certainly aren't white knights in this area), but that does not preclude that as a possible answer.
Second, do you honestly think, after keeping your email account with google for (presumably) 7 years and doing every single web search through them for 11 years that they need some "authoritative method" to figure out your identity?? I could see if you're starting an account today, but your conclusion here just makes no sense at all. You trusted a freaking privacy policy for all these years, but now that they offer pseudonyms for google+ accounts, the only possible conclusion is that they are now partners with the NSA to do....some unspecified evil?
I'm trying to stay civil here, but I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
I don't think my username here is particularly interesting, just a variation on a typical one that was already taken.
The point of Google+ seems to be to do networking with your friends and co-workers. Why would one want to be anonymous in this environment? You're going to anonymously share pictures of yourself? I do not get it. If it's a pseudonym that you just happen to really like, then okay -- maybe you've kept it since your days on AIM and are really fond of it, after all things like JHR1987ILOVETHEBEATLES are pretty cool -- but other than that what is the point of this?
It seems like wanting the right to carry a gun in space. It's not going to do you any good, so why are you fighting about it?
Yah, nothing could go wrong. Joe user's medical practice's patients, his frat buddies, the parents of his children's soccer league, his NRA buddies and the local chapter of Curious Men all are interested in the exact same photo of Joe? As I said, perspective is interesting. Lack of understanding is less interesting.
It seems to me that the only legitimate use of circles is with respect to people you are sharing with that you know in real life. If you want to talk to total strangers, then you want to be pseudonymous but you also have almost no reason to not post publicly.
That's fine; there is twitter, tumblr, even HN fit that model. All pseudonymous posts, all public all the time. Discussions with strangers.
Google+ can be used that way; I guess many people do. I somehow got marked as a redditor when I first signed up and I still have about 3 redditors that are strangers start following me every week, and I think it's pretty awful.
There is a huge space for online interactions with people who you know in meatspace, and plenty of reason why Google would want to get into that game. Product recommendations is the first thing that comes to mind; would you rather buy an item that your real life friend says is good or that a random person on the internet says is good? That is a benefit both to you and to google if they can provide that.
If you don't want to interact with people you know IRL, there are plenty of other services besides Google+ available online. Gmail remains one of them, it's a perfectly legitimate service to interact with strangers. It seems to me that you are throwing out the baby with the bathwater just because they are offering a product that you don't want to use, but that's obviously your choice.
> The only reason that it would take months to implement is because they're using some authoritative method - maybe ISP customer info, or government supplied info- to correlate users to reveal real identity.
This is seriously bordering on "batshit crazy" level conspiracy theory. What you are describing is impossible on so many levels; legal, technical and PR. I have no idea what they are implementing, but it's probably more along the lines of allowing people who are demonstrably known in real life by pseudonyms (like Lady Gaga, but less famous). The advantage is not from you using your real name, the advantage is from knowing the name that lots of people already know you by so all those people can easily find you on Google+. No one you know in real life would be able to find you on HN unless you specifically linked them to your profile; which again is fine, it is simply providing a different service, one where you could be talking to your best friend and never even know it.
After all, google is just the transportation medium why should it have any knowledge on whose data it transports, as long as it reaches the intended destination it's all good.
That's all good in theory but it's basically impossible in practice. You have to specifically get someones username in meatspace to be able to start following them on twitter; that probably works for your close friends but not at all for acquaintances. There are a couple of dozen people on Google+ and Facebook that follow me and vice versa that I have some interaction with that I never would have just gone up to and said "Send me your google+ username" in real life.
It just doesn't scale well at all; you have to memorize the mapping from username to actual name for your entire social graph. I have no desire to learn two names for each person, one actual name and one that looks like "0x12".
If I have an old friend named Pete Smith that I haven't interacted with in a while that is among the 200 people I am following on twitter, it's impossible for me to go look at his recent tweets or at-tweet to him something awesome that reminds me of old times, because I have no idea what his username is. His name is Pete Smith, that's what I always called him and that's what everyone calls him, why is he using a new name that potentially doesn't even map to something that people would identify as a name. There was a time where I knew my friend's username on a forum was some insane misspelling of Obsolete Oaf, and it was just literally impossible for me to type it because it was something like Obs0le7e 0af. I even knew my friends username was (in one sense) and I still didn't know it well enough to type it in to search.
There is enormous value to me in having people's names online be discoverable and searchable by the name that I actually know them by. Google+, Facebook and LinkedIn provide enormous value to me, tumblr and twitter provide almost none, and I don't think that is a coincidence.
Your experiences may differ, twitter and tumblr are both obviously very popular. I'm really not saying that you are wrong if you want to use those services, I do think you are wrong to act like a company is evil because it is providing a service that isn't what you want to use.
First of all, lots of us have friends or acquaintances we have never met in "meatspace". In many cases we do only know them by pseudonyms.
Pseudonyms we now can't use if we wish to connect to them on Google+
I started out in the C64 demo scene, and though I never released anything of significance, there were at least at one point more people that knew me by my pseudonym than by my real name. I don't use mine any more, but many do.
For a lot of those people, being able to be searchable by their pseudonym is important if they are to connect to friends, and in many cases, it may be detrimental for them to have their pseudonym tied to their real name.
Conversely many people very intentionally do not want to be searchable.
Google is free to operate with whatever rules they want within the law, but it is pretty infuriating when on one side they've shown they in some ways understand the social graph far better than facebook ("friendships" are NOT in any way symmetrical in real life, and we're usually very careful about what we share with whom), while in other ways totally failing to grasp that pseudonymity is also a massive part of human culture:
We don't carry around giant posters with a bunch of personal information tied to our full name. We often intentionally don't give our last names out. We often choose to either share about ourselves or let someone know our "real" identity.
Failing to grasp this is one thing. Continuing to boneheadedly refusing to acknowledge the problem and fixing it is another. It shows that Google understands the social graph far less than what the initial rollout of Google+ seemed to indicate.
To say that a website with even 40 million users should be catering to the extremely tiny (and apparently extremely vocal) minority of people who want to share things with people without sharing their name with those people is egotistical at best.
I honestly think that it is you don't understand that you are almost certainly in the minuscule minority of people who have a pseudonymous social graph, and that it is only to the detriment of most people to have screennames instead of real names on a social network.
I honestly believe there are more blind Americans then people who have any significant portion of their social graph as pseudonymous, you are acting it's absurd that Google isn't catering to the C64 demo scene. There are probably dozens of design choices that are preventing blind people from using Google+ how they would want it, but somehow that isn't making front page news, why not?
> We don't carry around giant posters with a bunch of personal information tied to our full name.
And on Google+ you get to choose who can see any part of your profile except for your name. There is no giant poster of personal information that is public unless that is exactly what you choose that you want.
> Conversely many people very intentionally do not want to be searchable.
On both facebook and Google+ you can set yourself not to be searchable in general; that is a completely different issue that being able to find someon you personally know among the list of your friends, or seeing a comment on one of your posts and having no idea who it is because the person is going by a completely random noun rather than what you actually call them.
Well, what can I say - in the cases where I know both wallet name and online identity for somebody, not only can I remember both, but if anything the pseudonym is easier. I mean, I can type Skud right off, but I have to go check how many Rs are in Kirrily (Kirilly? Kiriley?).
Also in my experience, if you slip and call someone by their nick in real life, they aren't offended. Unless you are writing them a job reference, it doesn't seem to be much of a problem.
And let's don't forget than in some cases an online persona's personality really is quite different from the meatspace one. In cases where this happens, a different name is almost a necessity. Who knows what the Macalope is like in real life? It doesn't matter, it has a name and a persona it the space that it operates in.
If you were looking for a guy who had my real name on facebook, you were out of luck. If you noticed one of your friends having a conversation with me, and asked who I was and knew me/recognized who I was due to the content of the conversation/recognized me as likely someone you might want to know based on your sampling of my adjacent nodes and my public content, you would have been able to find me.
>"There is enormous value to me in having people's names online be discoverable and searchable by the name that I actually know them by."
Not everybody wants to be discoverable in the same way. I may not want you to be able to find me just because you know my name. Maybe I want to avoid old one night stands/people I did drugs with/people I was in prison with/the obsessed schizophrenic who lives in my building and rely on my current network of friends and serendipity to populate my friend list.
I think the most important question is whether you are tolerant or intolerant towards that - noting that even if you do require real names, you won't be able to find mine anyway, because I won't be there. That question addressed to google or facebook is: "Are you still interested in me as a customer if you can't track me after I've left your system?"
If the answer if "No," you may not be evil, but you're certainly creepy.
I follow a number of people who associate by their (so far as I can ascertain) birth / given / legal names, and a number with evident pseudonyms (having gone so far as to seek out same). Several of these have noted that the apparent pseudonyms are in fact birth / given / legal names, go figure.
I use circles to categorize both inbound and outbound posts by content and context (NB: this doesn't work very well, and recent improvements in search help).
There are people I do know IRL who are on G+. None AFAIK actually know the link between my pseudonym and my legal identity, though of course, some may have done the math.
I frankly don't trust Google (or by extension its successors and/or business/government "partners") with my personally identifiable data, to this degree.
I've had the batshit crazy conspiracy shibboleth thing thrown at me before. Sometimes it's a valid criticism. Surprisingly often, it's not.
As for the "use another service" shibboleth: network effects and social/commerce expectations currently all but require use of Facebook in some contexts, and similar effects would almost certainly arise for any closed, proprietary successor. So long as social networks are closed, there really isn't a viable alternative. It's the equivalent of trying to exist without a phone or postal service in the 1980s or 1990s. Yes, it's possible, but only in a highly marginal way, and you'll find you're excluded from many interactions and services.
The real solution, the one I've been considering for some time, is an open social networking framework that breaks the silos. If social networking is truly the cat's meow, and sufficiently valuable that people demand it, and systems such as Diaspora can gain traction, I see the third-tier networks and open solutions (Diaspora, etc.) developing an open model. Think very strong analogs to how the GNU project and Linux emerged to the point that no proprietary Unix vendor can credibly be called a market leader, though several do survive (Sun as an Oracle subsidiary, AIX within IBM, Mac OS X as a consumer product, etc.).
The typical usecase for circles I've seen (aside from the obvious of protecting privacy) is when someone has multiple interests, not all of which any given contact will find interesting. For example, a person might have a foodies circle, a roleplaying circle, an anime circle, etc.
And many of the people who have circled me in this way I do not know IRL.
(Although my own take on this is that this is probably not an optimal use of circles, it has none the less sprung up as a fairly common application.)
However now they're scrambling to win the emerging market of following consumers around the web and they're pulling all the strings they have to get a competitive advantage.
It's now so ridiculous that we recommend web clients not to use Google Analytics - as it's providing google the ability to assess visitors to our client's site, only for the 'highest bidder'(namely a bigger competitor) to be able to advertise to them in response, squashing the smaller businesses who can't afford to drop 200k on advertising.
It lets whoever has the most money to pour into google's coffers effectively trample their competitors. Often we're using Google Analytics because our client isn't able to afford much to begin with.
To me, it's unsurprisingly that google dropped their "don't be evil" motto a few years back. This product lets people mark themselves as the little guy so the cashed up big-guns can stomp them out before they become a threat.
Wait, when did this happen? They appear to still have it, at least on their investor's code of conduct page[1].
[1]: http://investor.google.com/corporate/code-of-conduct.html
The first article cites the second one, and the author of the second one confirms it's an April Fools joke in the second comment on the page. They haven't dropped it at all.
Do you then conclude the same thing about Facebook, which has had a "real names" policy since basically forever?
"Facebook has always been based on a real-name culture. We think this leads to greater accountability and a safer and more trusted environment for our users." --Facebook spokesman Simon Axten, 2009
Is it possible that Google's social networking platform is following this principle for the same reason, and not because of some dastardly plan to build a dossier about you?
I still don't understand why Facebook gets a pass on this issue, when they have had a "real names" policy for much longer.
The upshot is that pseudonyms used mainly within circles of friends can exist without getting hassled --- to the point that this commenter on an earlier jwz post, with numerous pseudonymous friends, refused to believe that Facebook even had a "real names" policy at all:
http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/08/nym-wars/#comment-93494
(The largest such circle I'm aware of involves dozens of kids with pseudonymous Facebook accounts at a local middle school; I heard about this from a parent, who in turn is aware of it because their kid sometimes forgets to log out. So much for Zuckerberg's line about pseudonymity being a marginal concern of old fogies.)
They certainly could be more aggressive in tying Facebook accounts to real people, for instance, by requiring everyone to "verify" with a credit card or mobile number after a certain period of time. But they don't.
Everybody thought Google+ was going to be a better Facebook, remember?
But no, it's the same crap.
Also I'm just suggesting he keep that firstname.lastname@gmail.com account... just to have it. But not necessarily use it for anything personally identifiable.
You seem like a pretty reasonable guy. I'm surprised you'd write something like this.
The national security state that has built up over the past decade is not unaware of social networks, and sees them as an excellent opportunity to look for "terrorists".
I'm sure they really are looking for terrorists, but a key purpose of that process is correlating online and offline identities. It isn't very implausible that they would provide google with this information, because it would allow google to help provide them with the information they're seeking.
There isn't really much of a legal privacy protection anymore for anything plausibly having to do with "national security", and social networks seem to qualify.
I don't really know, I'm just deducing this from the fact that google says it will take a couple months to implement. It could be something completely else, but this is my guess.
Google+ tied with enormous Google adsense+display ads reach is scary. Google has recently started putting +1 button on their display ads. And may be soon they will put +1 button on text ads. And then any site you visit with Google ads, Google will know who you are.
More and more I am feeling Google's focus is ads not social, mobile, etc. Google+ and Android is just there to reach out and target ads better, which makes me sick :(
Remember, if you can't see what the product is - it's YOU. :-)
* Search - DDG is good enough most of the time
* Google+ - I can live without this, no biggie
* Reader - I love it, but it's not critical. Any suggestions for alternatives?
* Gmail - This is a big one. I don't want to use Hotmail/Yahoo either because that is just jumping from one frying pan to another. So anyone.....are you willing to build a DDG for Gmail? I am willing to pay for it as well. But I need a large inbox (5GB+), speed, reliability, great spam protection, priority inbox, don't sell my data, no personalized ads....and my money is yours :) I might even be willing to work with you on this, just don't have the time/inclination to do this alone.
* Google apps for business - at the moment, I just use the email feature of this extensively, so once again, the Gmail alternative can work here.
* Google analytics - there are pretty good competitors out there, though not necessarily free (but that's okay)
So in my opinion, apart from email, I think it's possible to move off Google's services without disrupting your life.
Whether moving off google specifically is really that useful, I'm mixed. No other cloud providers have a better record certainly. I guess I don't see the logic, except as a knee-jerk "enemy of the week" thing (mild troll: you're an iPhone user, right?). Getting your data out of the cloud in general makes more sense to me, but is a lot more difficult.
The question is whether productive use of email can be done without gmail (or more broadly cloud providers). It can, and it's not difficult. And if one really cares about privacy and archival concerns (and not just sticking it to Google) it's something one should investigate.
You can have two different views. Check the second and third screenshots of this page: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/netvibes-wasabi-a-blow-your-soc...
Here are my comments:
> I'm removing myself from google. I'm setting up mail services elsewhere, I'm migrating my Google Apps and App Engine accounts to other services. I've stopped using Plus, and as I move things elsewhere I'm deleting them from google. Gmail Accounts are still 'anonymous' and largely disconnected from plus accounts. If a person is really bothered by the pseudonym policy they can chose to continue using other services but plus.
> But requiring a real name, tells me that google doesn't just want to track me to advertise to me. They want to correlate my online activities with my offline identity. Well, if you had seen other comments, there are 2 reasons they have given for not allowing pseudonyms: (A) User behaviour is better and more dignified when real identities are used (Youtube comments vs Facebook comments on various blogs. HN is a niche community of professionals - doesn't count) (B) They cannot provide a fake support of pseudonyms - if they do they will provide full support
> ...online activities with my offline identity Possibly. Which is still fine for most people. As their online actions shadow their offline behaviour. Refer to previous point on how they think it will help the online community
> The search results stuff There was a recent article on HN itself I think, where this issue was discussed. Google is now focusing less on the technologically skilled users and trying to serve a larger mass. For them, autocorrect and instant are good. Again, this is NOT the topic of discussion here. You can turn off some of the features, I guess.
>PS: Last I remember, they were adding features using which you could opt out from analytics, adsense and other forms of tracking. If the direction you are suggesting is true, either Google has two very very different instances in existence or you will never be able to trust anyone. And by that, I mean that you will be in deep unrest as some distrust is necessary.
But they are not enforcing real identities, but real sounding names, which is the worst of both worlds: It makes people more likely to think they are dealing with real names, while it is trivial for those who want to use pseudonyms to continue doing so if their purpose is to be trolls.
> Which is still fine for most people.
That it's fine for "most people" still means it will effectively silence a lot of people on Google+ that a lot of other people would like to be able to communicate with.
It massively reduces the value of the service for me, and others.
Additionally, this is not the worst of both worlds. Worst of both worlds would be to selectively allow pseudonyms to some and while others have to use real identity. That not only makes the service partial, but skewed towards anarchy (using it for the lack of a replacement).
Given a choice between pseudonyms and real identities - the choice is based majorly on the type of culture the networks supports. For example: I tend to use the same username nearly everywhere - unfortunately I can't comment on youtube; the culture is very troll-y and I would not like to be associated at all. On the other hand, Buzz was quite successful in my university - majorly because it was associated with sort-of-a-real identity (Everyone was using clean & real names) which resulted in much saner, smarter interaction that was fun to be a part of. Facebook seems to have achieved the same though real sounding names which is the reason many blogs use their comment system.
[edit: typos]
They have a lot of nice features for configurability too.
I'm not ready to switch to it full time, but have been curiously looking around for alternatives to gmail. In general, running an email server yourself is a bit of a pain.
Also, be advised that Iceland has implemented strong privacy policies, and that might be a good jurisdiction to host your email.
The other gotcha for me is google reader. I use it constantly.
Seriously, for an entrepreneur, what is the motivation for having an anonymous social media account?
I certainly understand the issue of one's privacy, but if you are expecting to run a successful online business, your identity will need to be defined across the social media platforms. If that profile is not defined and you are a successful entrepreneur, your profile will be created for you (in wiki style).
There might be times when you want to communicate with people on a topic, without their being aware of who you are and what you do for a living, which could color the conversation or potentially even jeopardize your business.
Maybe you need to maintain contacts and industry awareness without alerting your competitors to your every move or to who your clients are. Maybe you are a victim of corporate espionage. Maybe you find yourself in the unenviable position of needing to both develop and manage a business and be a whistle-blower at the same time. There are any number of potential reasons.
We socialize without tieing things to our full name all the time. Why should online be different?