The Definitive Guide To Google Authorship Markup

It seems to me that Google's Authorship Markup process requires providing Google with a lot of information, including links to all your other social networking identities, a photo (the requirements for the photo sound like the requirements for a passport photo; can anyone say "facial recognition software?), etc.

There already exist secure digital signature algorithms that I would think could be entirely adequate to uniquely identify an author, without handing out all this other information to Google.

What if I want to write under a pseudonym? There has to be a way of controlling an online author's identity without surrendering every little bit of one's privacy.