> What does it cost you to have a Google+ account, if you only use it for reviewing apps, and things like that? You don't have to use the stream.
Well, there are two strings to that. Decency and effect. For me the first one is the main one.
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Decency:
My attitude towards relationships is based on standards of, among others, fairness and decency. There are some things that reliably nice people just don't do except in direst need - and even then they pay a price for doing it, (good people don't kill in line utilitarian ideals and then shrug about it and go home whistling a merry tune for example. Doing bad things should make you feel bad if you desire to see yourself as good.) So, to a large extent, the cost is in how the thing is done. Google could be forcing me into something that I was really going to enjoy and I'd still resent them for it. I hate the feeling of being bullied, of having control taken away from me, and now I'm an adult I don't have to put up with it. The cost to me, a very large part of it, is that I'm encouraging bullying behaviour in society - and that's not something that makes sense if you're against bullying, and it feels bad to violate your standards in the same way that lying to someone you really love feels bad.
I think that's a fairly general feeling in our society; being forced into something/acting against our values being bad that is; and I think it's one that makes a lot of sense when you're playing iterative games. We don't like to be told that there's something for us to do, but we like to be asked if we can lend a hand. We don't like to be obligated but we like to help. We feel bad when we lose our tempers and yell at our kids. We feel good when we make people smile and laugh. Most people want to live in a world where fairness is important, where others respect their reasonable boundaries and where when things change they change to benefit both parties who freely consent to the change. We like to believe lots of things about ourselves, and about each other, and unless we behave as if those things matter to us - why ought they to matter to anyone else?
Consequently, if you treat people like crap, violate accepted standards of socialising, then there's a social cost that you have to pay whenever interacting with anyone who operates with strong standards of behaviour; your presence becomes in a sense disgusting to them.
That's the decency side of things. Maybe that doesn't mean as much to you as it does to me, but it means a lot to me. Your worth in the world, to me, comes down to what sort of person you are inside - what sort of likely ways of thinking give rise to your actions.
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Effect:
'I certainly don't want my name associated with any public-facing element of my accounts. My name's for close personal friends only - you can do a lot of damage to someone if you know their name and even more if you have a picture of them. The more stuff you stick together into one account, the more control the person loses and the greater your risk across all the elements of the service becomes in all respects - privacy, security and even in terms of google screwing you over for something.'
Now you could say, and quite reasonably, google has so much information about you, what do you care if they have your name too? Does it really make any difference if they know that computer #1,4357,56 is actually Cassandra? I think it does. I think they're going to publish that that's your name and I think it's going to tie into a lot of your other online activities. It will make you searchable, and vulnerable - even without malice on the part of the other party, in a way that you weren't previously. It will translate real world relationships to a digital realm, and vice versa.
You don't even have to make much use of the account for it to contain information about you. Others in your peer group will find you, and they'll start tagging you in photos and suddenly there are pictures of you on the internet alongside your name and location and the people you associate with. Social accounts represent a point of vulnerability. If you don't manage them, then others will do so for you - and rarely to your benefit. I mean honestly, when's the last time someone actually asked you before they tagged you in a photo?
What are you going to do? Not friend them? Now who looks like the anti-social arsehole... The whole situation is of course avoided by default if you don't have an account.
Even if we put that to one side for a moment there are other problems though.
Even just in terms of account security: What happens if someone makes a complaint against your youtube account if you're linked into all the services as one? People have gone after my account before just because they didn't like a girl doing tech tutorials. You get these sorts of really creepy cave-dwellers who are just out to attack everything vaguely creative and decent in the world and suddenly you've overlaid the part of your risk profile that's vulnerable to them with every aspect of your digital life.
Now my name would be tied to every review I made - what happens if someone takes exception to it? People have been threatened with legal action over reviews that companies don't like before. Now my business 'friends' can search out what I do and review, what happens if I say something they don't like? Am I going to give an honest review of something ever again if someone can see that I thought their product needed more work? No, that's the sort of thing that can come back and bite you in the arse.
What if some random arsehole just decides to see how far they can screw people over? Before, without a name, it wasn't much trouble. Now, I wouldn't be so sure. You can do a lot of damage to someone with their name and a few other details. Especially so outside of Europe where the data-protection laws are either less powerful or just flat-out non-existent. It's noticable easier, for instance, when someone's doing research to find someone specific in the US than it is in the UK....
If it were just a name floating around, unattached to any actions that the person took and impossible for people looking for them to tie back to their real identity, then that would be one thing. Any attack could come up with a whole list of people's names just by randomly hashing common names together - what would really be the point? But it's going to be tied to meaning - that's why Google want it in the first place, after all.
I really don't want random people on the internet to have my name, or for random people in real life to follow me back home and onto my computer via the internet. I like my life to have huge brick walls between its different aspects. My work is my work, my friends are my friends, the internet is the internet. For them to have that sort of integrated weapon to use against me is not desirable. Especially when I'm not going to know, if one of them turns around and screws me, who they are - there's a power asymetry for the first person to act on the internet that combined with anonymity is truly scary.
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But maybe all that sounds paranoid to you. I don't know, maybe you don't mind people who you don't know on the internet having your real name - after all, it's not like they can look you up on government registers once they've got your name. Maybe... maybe none of them on their own seem very likely or very significant if you were to assume that they happened to you.
But look at the number of them. And what have we got on the other side of the scale? Correcting map mistakes and reviewing apps is something that I do that adds value to Google's service. It's a favour if you will, I just happen to like helping people. But if they really want to make it difficult, if they think they've got something that can use against me and they're prepared to use it, then ... why should I pay these sorts of risks and social costs?
> And if you ever want to read reviews of an app written by your friends instead of complete strangers, and want your friends to read your reviews, which is a feature many people like, how do you suggest that Google should implement that feature?
Just make it a function of integrating your friends lists. There's no reason you can't have one friends list referenced from multiple places and or read differently by different accounts - or several friends lists with different access settings. Heck you could even have one account that has different access settings that restricts cross-contamination between private spheres and public spheres. It would look more or less the same from the outside bar that the infrastructure to control your disclosure and to limit your risks would be there from the ground up. It's not particularly complicated to integrate or synchronise the parts of your service that customers want integrated and still maintain functional seperation.
But, in any case, my complaint isn't that people have the option of integrating their accounts. Demanding that they not have that option would make me no less of a bully than Google. If you want to, while I might advise against it (Google can't change their mind about disclosing what they don't have), that's really your business. My complaint is that pressure is applied to try to make people do it.