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Comment by ritikk | Hacker News Reader

To pause the Google-hate, and the same G+ identity talk for just one second I'd like to point out that the details in that post are not accurate.

First and most important - the linchpin to that whole post is wrong:

Google's response was that her outing was "user error" - Google blamed her, the user for not understanding the new, confusing integration.

That statement is untrue, the author is citing a previous reporting that never received any statement from Google: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/07/google-han...

Nonetheless the incident itself was self-inflicted:

The trans woman in question flashed a ROM which skipped the usual disclaimer and notice about which identity will be used: https://twitter.com/eiridescent/status/419604310213672960

Also it's very unfair to cavalierly invoke that Grantland tragedy and to choose that very provocative title to drive page views.

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I tried following your arguments, but failed. The woman in question flashed CM11 and (official, unchanged, albeit unsupported/in a grey area if you grab them yourself?) GApps. G+ etc. is part of that and as far as I can tell and that is what the person in question states in the discussion you link.

How do you know that 'The ROM'(?) 'skipped all disclaimer and notice about which identity will be used'? The Twitter link at least doesn't say that at all.

Obviously you might have a point, but you didn't present it well/the facts given don't match what you claim to know.

Because I got the disclaimer: http://www.groovypost.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Hangout...

And another screen after it notifying me.

That screenshot doesn't seem to indicate to me that any change to any outgoing identity is to happen. The only thing it tells me is that I can use Hangouts to send SMS.

I haven't used android in a while, so you still might very well be right, but the screenshot you've posted as an example doesn't tell us anything.

Once SMS is turned on you get a message on top of the screen informing you what identity will be used, can't seem to find a screen shot of that (probably since people don ' way to publicise that info).

You appear to be extrapolationg your experience of an OS on a device with a bunch of accounts to her experience of a differently installed OS on a different device with different accounts. Then you appear to be saying that she is wrong and that it's her fault.

Part of the problem is the lousy quality of journalism. From reading TFA we can't know what actually happened. But if you know what happens on simillarly installed OSs and accounts it'd be great if you could present a clear wallthrough.

At the moment you seem to be making irrelevant points.

It's certainly not Google's fault, either, if someone flashes a third party "mod" ROM to their device that may or may not have had disclaimers and EULAs removed, any more than it's Adobe's fault that I didn't see a claus in the EULA claiming my firstborn because I didn't buy Photoshop but instead pirated it, and the pirates replaced the EULA with an ad for their 0-day warez site.

This article is riding the anti-Google+ bandwagon, as you mentioned exploiting a very complex, highly nuanced tragedy to try to bolster page views. It's just as unfortunate to blame complex societal issues (like the acceptance of transgenders, criminal backgrounds, educational history, etc.) on a technology or software product, as if Google Hangouts carefully considered the ramifications of a male versus female name and decided to "out" the user maliciously.

Cue the sardonic "don't be evil" scare-quotes that inevitably appear.

Though I don't know if I'd go as far as blaming the user -- it is possible the system had two or more identifiers and confused them. Indeed, the core purpose of Google+ is as a simple aggregation of disparate identity systems across Google's properties and apps, so such conflicts are a virtual inevitability. Hangouts was upgraded, to much cheering, specifically to aggregate SMS and IM functionality, so if you were living a different life on both things might get complicated.

It's extremely hard to hide or change the past. It was hard before the internet, and has become effectively impossible now. It is almost irrational to expect to transition to a new life and an entire legacy of breadcrumbs will disappear, especially while trying to hold onto some parts of that prior life.

Well it might soon be legally required in the EU. Wanna do business here? Make it possible.

I don't see the google plus issue as one of hiding her past as it was her 'new' name which was leaked to the co-workers not her old one which she had been using at work.

I see it as an issue of trying to maintain two identities at the same time on the same hardware. This was no easy task before different accounts all got tied together. Now I will agree it is much harder.

While using different sets of hardware is how drug dealers accomplish this task in TV and movies a person doing so for non criminal purposes should not be required to go through this, however I don't know how and I won't speculate on how such users can or should be able to do this, as that is a complex problem.

I do not use my legal name on things online but I am fairly consistent with my name use, as such I am privileged enough to have google+ using the name I would like it to display. As such I am also unable to identify all the sources google+ uses to determine ones name. Would I be correct in assuming it is only things in the google ecosystem, or does google somehow scrape name data from other sources such as Twitter?

> Cue the sardonic "don't be evil" scare-quotes that inevitably appear.

Those aren't scare quotes. That is quoting an actual full heading from one of their founding documents [1]:

"Don't be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served-as shareholders and in all other ways-by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company."

as well as their internal code of conduct [2].

[1] http://investor.google.com/corporate/2004/ipo-founders-lette...

[2] http://investor.google.com/corporate/code-of-conduct.html

A scare quote isn't a manufactured quote, but instead is taking something someone (or some thing like a corporation) said and making one's skepticism/doubt readily apparent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes

Google creates a real identity for you, without you explicitly asking them to, based on the information they already have about you, like your interests(google now), gmail account (and its contents!!!), youtube, blogger, author profile, G maps, waze, android (photos, who you call, who calls you) GPS (where you go, with whom, how much you stay there), your friends, coleagues, acquaintances and possibly indexed 3rd party web pages. And they buried what they are doing and the privacy controls through dark patterns, so most of the people aren't even aware of that.

Not only they are forcing the majority of the internet population to have an account pulling information from different parts of their lives, they are forcing them to use that account publicly and start identifying with it - youtube, sms, email, blogger (soon waze?).

Tell me how dystopian this is? Now consider that the same company knows all the sites you visit and how you got there.

Except that isn’t true! your G+ account is only created by you and only shows what you want it to.

That is just another one of the inaccuracies in that post that are stated as fact.

Nice try, google employee.

Even if people don't have a google+ account (even if they don't have a gmail account), do you really think google aren't building a profile with as much personal data as they can collect?

That is not the same thing. An ad targeting secret profile is different form a public G+ profile.

So you're not denying the Google employee charge?

Maybe he's ignoring it, because it is stupid and irrelevant?

Jesus. Bring on the witch hunt...

Some of us have long memories of astroturfing and don't much care for it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20000118072436/http://lists.esse...

That... is not what we're talking about.

With all respect, I don't use Googles services anymore myself, but your posts in this thread have been as... partisan, for lack of a better term, as the person you claim is a "Google employee". You're just on different sides of that.

I never claimed or pretended to be neutral.

Well screaming like a (anti)fanboy doesn't fit in with HN's discourse, and will make the majority of people dismiss what you have to say. That's as shame, as I actually agree with you on this topic somewhat.

Google created my G+ account automatically. I removed everything from it, but it is not "only created by you".

No it didn't, it might have been created when you joined something that required it and there was a check mark somewhere, it gets populated by stuff that you added when you started Google account like date of birth etc, but you get presented with that as well.

I doesn’t just get created on its own.

Actually, when I created a disposable gmail account a couple of years ago, it came with google plus already active. I deleted that part, of course, but I never signed up for it.

No checkboxes and no options that I ever saw.

I'm the kind of person that explores all menu options and such in software to make sure it doesn't run/install anything I don't want. When signing up for services online, I go through all the settings. I even occasionally go through my Gmail settings to make sure nothing has changed.

Maybe it was "designed" to give me an option, but I never had an option. Gmail isn't bug-free either. Over the years I've run into a few bugs. Occasionally the link for the inbox shows I have unread mail, but there is none. I'm able to fix it by doing a search for unread mail, and the link changes showing that I don't have any unread mail.

> I even occasionally go through my Gmail settings to make sure nothing has changed.

Yeesh. It's stuff like this that makes me glad I run my own mail/CalDAV/CardDAV server, and am thus free to use throwaway accounts for all of my interaction with Google.

I wonder if there'd be any interest in an old-fashioned HOWTO that starts with a freshly imaged VPS and goes through the whole setup process. It's been a few years since I set everything up, but I've been planning to redo it on a fresh box anyway, and writing the HOWTO wouldn't add much effort.

I think that's a good idea. I know I'll be looking for some examples in a couple of months when I have enough time to dedicate setting one up properly.

You may or may not have seen it already, but in case you haven't, I'll link here the "How to NSA-proof your email" howto [1] someone just posted in the "Gmail was down" thread. Regardless of how you feel about the Black Chamber, it's an excellently well-written document on setting up your own mail-serving VPS using postfix and dovecot; the filesystem-level encryption stuff is trivially severable, and constitutes about 80% of what I'd have written (but not as well) had I not found this first. The other 20% would be setting up Baïkal for CalDAV/CardDAV service, but that's pretty straightforward and well described in the Baïkal Github repo.

(Minor quibbles about the HOWTO: I'm not sure Solr is really necessary; Dovecot seems to give me full-text search for free via IMAP. Also, I tried Z-push and it worked, but didn't support message flags, which I require, and I got tired of push pretty fast anyway. It works, and might've added message flags in the years since I tried it, but it's by no means required. Still, an excellent document, which I unreservedly recommend.)

[1] http://sealedabstract.com/code/nsa-proof-your-e-mail-in-2-ho...

I love the implication that having something auto-opt you into something and then doing it is the same thing as voluntarily doing it. Like we're supposed to be ok with the companies we do business with behaving like evil genies.

created 15 minutes ago

But to answer you, so the casual reader does not get confused, you get a Google+ account when you use gmail or youtube or pretty much any other google service.

Why are you creating two accounts to respond to this thread?

Because I suspect he's a google shill.

This isn't true for your public profile. Whatever you share on google+ is what you, youself, put on it. It doesn't share the sex they can deduce you have, it shares the sex you entered yourself. Same with the name and everything else.

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