Jwz: Google's pseudonym support "obvious bullshit"
1–10 of 175 posts
Re: Jwz: Google's pseudonym support "obvious bullshit"
#2I think he's missing a distinction here.
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
Re: Jwz: Google's pseudonym support "obvious bullshit"
#3I'll bet they still require you to register with your "real" name, but then they'll graciously allow you to have a linked nickname or two,
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.
Re: Jwz: Google's pseudonym support "obvious bullshit"
#4I think he's missing a distinction here. 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 ab…
> That's what I consider pseudonymity
But that's not what pretty much everyone pushing pseudonymity in this fight considers pseudonymity, so your distinction is not very helpful.
Re: Jwz: Google's pseudonym support "obvious bullshit"
#5Solution: Don't use Google+ to speak out against your authoritarian government. "Fuck those guys" is a pretty strong response to people who've decided their product isn't for you.
Re: Jwz: Google's pseudonym support "obvious bullshit"
#6I'll bet they still require you to register with your "real" name, but then they'll graciously allow you to have a linked nickname or two, 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 ca…
> > meaning they're still fully prepared to roll over on you
> 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.
Re: Jwz: Google's pseudonym support "obvious bullshit"
#7Everyone is also missing the bigger point that Google's idea of a valid real name is incredibly north american and anglo centric. There are plenty of cases of people using their real names, be in European, or African or what ever and google still kicking them off.
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.
Re: Jwz: Google's pseudonym support "obvious bullshit"
#8I'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.
Re: Jwz: Google's pseudonym support "obvious bullshit"
#9I'll bet they still require you to register with your "real" name, but then they'll graciously allow you to have a linked nickname or two, 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 ca…
I just don't get what the big deal is. Here we've got a platform that would be so much better with a more diverse user base, and Google is wasting time on petty stuff like what name you use. In my opinion, as long as you are producing content your circles enjoy, who cares what name you go by?
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.
Re: Jwz: Google's pseudonym support "obvious bullshit"
#10While I don't know what their plans are, I think it's reasonable to require you declare whether your the name you use is your real name or a pseudonym, which is a non trivial change.