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Comment by nirvana | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Google pretty regularly for the past 11 years, and have had a gmail account since soon after it was announced. However with the release of Plus and the revelation of their policies on "real names", I've come to realize that I no longer trust google.

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.

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I'm right with you on this one. I personally think the old 'don't be evil' motto is looking very tatty these days. That was always going to happen, I guess, but sometimes I find it very hard to find a difference between activities of companies Google used to speak out against, and modern Google.

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.

Google is a false prophet hiding behind the veil of their "don't be evil" mantra. Google is the real evil corporation but these geeks are too blind to see it. Now they know what these guys at Google are up to.

That describes pretty much every other for-profit corporation that we all do business with on a daily basis as consumers.

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.

Maybe not everything has to be a purely "for-profit" endeavor. There are alternatives and there are plenty of people willing to support change.

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/10/to_reform_capitalism_ceos_sh...

> Google is the real evil corporation but these geeks are too blind to see it.

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.

whatever you think will make you happy.

You're trying too hard. People usually do that when they're defending someone they know is guilty. People usually just let the facts speak for themselves.

This is a really poor argument IMHO. You haven't addressed any of his points.

I disagree, google automatically created and logged me into a youtube account just because I was logged into gmail. It cannot be deleted, and it told me:

"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 most important question is not what are they doing but how you expect them to use this In the future. Good or bad intent is beside the point. Google wants to grow in a serious way and they not against some unethical actions to reach those goals. If groth continues they are going to have a near monopoly is many areas. It is best to have a fall back plan. I really don't want to have them as my omeaning ome or acess with the world. The above comment to early Microsoft was apt. The people that trust google would also have trusted MS before they threw all there loyal coustomers under the bus to lock out Netscape. I am sure they had no idea how much the tight integration with IE would hurt security and stability but they did control the market for some time.

The benefits of completly relying on google are minimal the potential costs are nontrivial.

You may (or may not) be surprised but when I was there a lot of energy was spent by the rank and file on not being evil.

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.

I'm not surprised at all. Back in 2006 when I was doing competitive strategy at MS and studying Google's culture, I came away very impressed with how much people throughout the organization cared about not being evil. But the dynamics you describe were already in play.

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?

And people who really want to "win" will be as evil as they need to be in order to "win" (however they define winning, hence the quotes).

You describe what I was trying to say. It's easy to be non-evil in a startup environment for a variety of reasons.

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.

"Don't be evil" is a flawed motto to begin with and should have been something like "be good" if they were serious about it. People thinks all kinds of things, like war, are "not evil".

Read the story behind the motto.

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.

What exactly do you expect them to do? They are not a charity or a non-profit. They either have to stay competitive or die. I hardly call that evil .

You want to win in a way that doesn't diminish you as a person. Corporations are not just beholden to their shareholders, they are beholden to their sense of values and to the values of their leaders and employees. Google, of all companies, are powerful enough and have clever enough employees to find a way to not only stay competitive but to beat the competition in a way that is demonstrably non-evil. That they don't seem to be doing this is in fact quite a shame.

I can't speak for anyone but myself of course but living the 'don't be evil' motto would result in Google sometimes leaving money on the table if taking it would involve betraying some trust. When this comes up it is inevitably a privacy violation that people are concerned about, but sometimes its a bait-and-switch type situation like the new pricing for AppEngine.

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.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101587/

It's hard enough to figure out how much money a product will make when you're building, but you want companies to come out with SEC-acceptable projections for how much they would have made on projects they chose not to build?

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.

"It's hard enough to figure out how much money a product will make when you're building, but you want companies to come out with SEC-acceptable projections for how much they would have made on projects they chose not to build?"

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."

This is seriously silly.

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.

Trust is ever-changing. For instance, if you trust sane thoughts or actions from an entity only to one day perceive that the same source creates not so-sane thoughts or actions, do you lose trust in that entity? Perspective is an interesting thing just as is your pseudonym here.

My point is perhaps narrower than you are seeing. It was not that trust levels don't change, or advocating for some level of trust. Just that his conclusions do not follow from the evidence presented, to the point where the connection borders on the irrational (to me).

I don't think my username here is particularly interesting, just a variation on a typical one that was already taken.

I agree entirely with magicalist. I've tried to get my head around the stink about real names on Google+ since it first went crashing through the internet, but it seems like people shouting about teacups being too small.

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?

Substitute space with "Google space", add in Google becoming an online/offline identity provider without the same access(or oversight) as your local County Clerk of records, add in shareholder value and the the innocent concerns of networking with friends and co-workers(oh, Google is considerate enough to add companies and other entities to the mix to increase the fun party factor because nothing is free right?) becomes apparent.

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.

> They want to correlate my online activities with my offline identity.

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.

You can be pseudonymous to google but known to your friends, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

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.

> You can be pseudonymous to google but known to your friends, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

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.

you have to memorize the mapping from username to actual name for your entire social graph

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.

You are making a lot of assumptions.

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.

That is all well and good, I hope you can realize that the vast majority of people were not part of the C64 demo scene, and the vast majority of people meet new people strictly in meatspace (except perhaps online dating, which is for the purpose of meeting people in meetspace).

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.

Depends on your definition of close friends, and your definition of acquaintances. If acquaintances include the boyfriend of someone you somewhat knew in high school, then my use of a pseudonym that I had never used before worked for acquaintances while using facebook. What it didn't work for was people who simply had my name but didn't know any of my friends and/or were not specifically invited by me in facebook or real life to become my friend.

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.

>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.

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.)

Unfortunately G+ circles are not a good fit for the use case you describe, because whether you are permitted to see a post (which certainly should be at the author's discretion) is different from whether you are interested enough to see it in your stream (which should be at yours, but G+ can't handle that).

Generally, what someone will do is make a public post with their list of interest based circles, then ask people to reply stating which they'd like to be in. I agree though, this does tend to be rather awkward.

Since it takes only one counterexample: I participate (pseudonymously) in G+.

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.).

For a long time I thought that google's services were "free", a nice exchange for being advertised to in response to searches.

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.

It's interesting what you say about Google Analytics, I've always suspected that but then dismissed it as my personal paranoia. Is there any way to prove such a theory, or are there any studies into this available online?

> To me, it's unsurprisingly that google dropped their "don't be evil" motto a few years back.

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

Back in 2009.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/foremski/google-drops-dont-be-evil...

http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2009/04/goog...

Look at the date on both of those news reports... :)

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.

> 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.

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.

Who says Facebook gets a pass?

Everybody thought Google+ was going to be a better Facebook, remember?

But no, it's the same crap.

As bad_user said, who said Facebook is getting a pass? Facebook started out with very limited reach requiring a university affiliation. Seemed pretty safe and close-knit at the time. Membership has grown to anyone and privacy has slid ever since.

Facebook gets a pass in part because they've been a lot less aggressive in enforcing the policy. They'll shut down a pseudonymous account when someone brings it to their attention (most notoriously, the Chinese writer who was going on Facebook by his longtime pen name, Michael Anti), but they don't go searching them out.

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.

I have many, many friends with obviously fake names on FB and nobody ever got into trouble. With terms & conditions usually being dozens of pages that nobody ever reads, I don't think you can blame people for not caring about FB's official position as long as it practically allows anonymity.

I think removing yourself from Google is a mistake. It will give anyone with malevolent intentions the opportunity to remake your account with the same name, pictures and possibly misrepresent you. A better way to boycott them is to maintain a static account. Simply take ownership of your identity but not give them any personal data about yourself or your friends. There's nothing they hate more than a user who doesn't +1.

I thought Google will verify the identity to prevent false claim of an identity, right? Without verification, what good is "Real Name"?

I don't think they've started that yet except with celebrities... and I'm still unsure how that will take place, when or if ever.

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.

What techniques can they use to truly verify identity? When I set up my G+ account, they didn't ask for a credit card, or a copy of my drivers license. I'm pretty sure I could have put in Peter Parker if I wanted.

Just a note that you can easily get a credit card issued for Peter Parker.

Excellent point. People have probably faked every possible form of identification in history. The other problem is that as soon as you do acquire an account, if you ever use it, giving it up - if the id is revoked and recycled, you've just left yourself wide open.

You think Google might be using government-supplied information to figure out real identities on Google+?

You seem like a pretty reasonable guy. I'm surprised you'd write something like this.

Do you remember in 2009 when the White House issued an RFQ for companies to bid on the contract of taking Social Network feeds and analyzing them looking for "terrorists"?

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.

Imagine you are a state and you have this company that sits on an incredible treasure trove of personal information, something that was previously available only to your own specialized agencies. Not trying to get a hold of this information would mean not doing the best job protecting state security. So it is highly likely that Google is already very tightly fused with the state. And that would trivially explain the push for real names - Google doesn't really need it to advance their business, but it'd be incredibly useful for the state.

I agree with you nirvana. I have been using Google search for 12 years and Gmail for 7 years. But recently Google has been trying to do each and everything.

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 :(

Of course Google's focus is ads - that's how they make their money. Why would you expect them to focus on anything else?

Remember, if you can't see what the product is - it's YOU. :-)

At first blush, targeted advertising seems scary. Upon a second look, who cares? This isn't the Gestapo, they're trying to sell you hamburgers. So what if they know that you like Orson Scott Card? I like that Amazon occasionally introduces me to a book I will enjoy, that's a benefit to me. I only look at ads for ~.3% of the time I'm on a website anyway, so what difference does it make to me if they're more to my taste?

I have been considering this recently as well, and exploring the alternatives...

* 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.

You could try Netvibes, they have a news reader which was good enough for me to make the switch.

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...

Just host your own mail. You're never going to get those requirements met by a service. The incentives don't match. Spamassassin can't match gmail, but even for my address (in use for 15 years!) it's reasonable: maybe 6-10 false negatives per day.

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.

Spam filtering is just one from a long list of features that Gmail has that I don't know of any other email service providing, though.

Sure. But playing the "checklist feature" game can lock you into any platform you want to argue about. I have stuff in my private hosting that I can't get from gmail too (procmail triggers and filtering, I can deliver mail from my business address through the corporate SMTP servers over a VPN, ...).

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.

[I am surprized that this post is still on the top!]

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.

> (A) User behaviour is better and more dignified when real identities are used

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.

Both the points you are making, makes Google a bad marketing/strategy firm but not evil: the sentiment I was replying to. And this is being done after they have agreed to provide support for pseudonyms! It may not be their first priority - or may require significant changes in the way data is being handled to allow for security of the real identity. But the OP assumed that this is because of a conspiracy between the firm, ISPs and Government, and that the company is not to be trusted. I fail to understand how does this results in the conclusion that the company is not trustworthy or moral. It can be derived that company is rigid, slow, lazy and even a poor investment. Failing to provide a feature(and yes it's a feature not a right - the service is no way mandatory) that might affect a significant (in terms of their reach and not numbers) consumer base makes them a bad service provider - not evil genius.

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]

What are the best alternatives for email?

Don't know about best, but www.fastmail.fm/help/overview_features.html is pretty cool. It is what it says, fast. No graphics, clean web interface, runs quick on anything, including crappy old hardware or phones. Opera recently bought them so if you run Opera on your phone it is especially nice. Very reliable, hardly ever down and on the rare occasions it goes down it's usually back up within minutes. You can hook up pretty much any client you like, of course. And they don't read your mail to serve you ads.

I recently converted to Fastmail. $20/year for spam protection and a 1GB inbox. For my personal mail on my Android phone it's gold.

They have a lot of nice features for configurability too.

I personnaly use Fastmail and I'm very happy with it. As any other serious competitor, it's not free, though, around $50 a year for the best plan (10gB, custom domain and file storage, among other goodies).

I've been playing around with OSX Lion Server installed on my home fios connection on a mac mini server. Apple built a webmail interface that's not as good as gmail, but works if you primarily use a client and just need webmail sometimes.

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.

http://www.tuffmail.com/ You pay for mailbox size, with no limit on the number of email aliases or domains you can map to it. They also host Roundcube webmail.

I started out looking for dedicated email services. But in the end I found that regular old shared hosting accounts provide email.

Also, be advised that Iceland has implemented strong privacy policies, and that might be a good jurisdiction to host your email.

Personally, I use and recommend Gandi (https://www.gandi.net/). If you purchase a domain name from them ($15/year or less), you can use their email with your domain. You can either use a standard mail client with their SMTP and IMAP servers, or you can use their webmail interface (roundcube). Plus, you get an email at your own domain, and you can thus easily switch email providers without changing your email address.

Good points. Just out of curiosity, are you moving to another webmail and which one? Ease of use and convenience of using Gmail is the only reason why I haven't switched yet.

I have tried a few other mail services, but finding one I am as happy with as gmail has proven difficult. Not even considering how difficult it can be to communicate your email address verbally to someone. Most people you can just say "at gmail dot com" and they get the rest of it. I haven't had to spell out my email address one letter at a time in quite a while. Not so with some of the other hosts I have tried.

The other gotcha for me is google reader. I use it constantly.

Why on earth would you want to remain anonymous on social platforms as an entrepreneur? Frankly, most of your businesses' success rides on who is running the show, and investors and customers want to know about who is running the show. Even if you don't want a social media profile, that is OK. But to insist on an anonymous one? Why?

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).

Wanting support for pseudonymity doesn't mean you're always using it. I can see someone using a non-anon account by day, anon during off-time.

I still pose the question "why?" In social media, the reason you created your account is to socialize. I don't understand why in the context of developing and managing a business, one needs an anonymous profile.

Because you don't want your opinions and tastes unrelated to your business to be associate with your business.

Because an entrepreneur should also have the ability to be an activist.

Well for one, in the context of developing and managing a business, secrecy is often of paramount importance. Why does Apple go apeshit every time an engineer of theirs leaves a prototype phone in a bar? Shouldn't they just relax and enjoy the free publicity?

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.

Most of us don't walk around with a big sign around our neck with our full name when we socialize. Most of us don't even do that during work even with customer facing jobs, and plenty of companies that do require name tags allow pseudonyms.

We socialize without tieing things to our full name all the time. Why should online be different?

Who said anything about entrepreneurs? Most Google+ users and not entrepreneurs and don't want to be entrepreneurs.

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