121–130 of 175 posts
Great. Another opinionated post with no substance that reaches number one. What is this garbage? It's not like this person even has any first-hand knowledge of anything with regards to the cited excerpt. Why would anyone upvote such a short, speculative rant?
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> 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…
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.
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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 org…
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 promotio…
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.…
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…
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.…
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.
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'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 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 ar…
Remember, if you can't see what the product is - it's YOU. :-)
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If Google knows your name but allows you to post under a pseudonym then how can someone scratch the surface and find out your real name (unless they work for Google)? That's like saying you can't post an anonymous blog because the web provider knows your real name.
By getting a warrant. By not getting a warrant but saying it's a matter of national security. By fraudulently misusing your government id and claiming you have some right to the information.
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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 Faceb…
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.