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Dear Googles: G+/YouTube Anschluss – you've done outed me

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Re: Dear Googles: G+/YouTube Anschluss – you've done outed me

#181

Post by AndiS »

rryan wrote: post #68

Instead of merging with your G+ account you can link it to a G+ page (and use your YT username or other pseudonym as its name). This is part of the "link your account" flow. I think this would fix her problem.

I have since linked it to a dead-end G+ page. However, I wasn't given the option to do so initially -- I was confronted with my name and photo appearing on a comment that I'd been leaving under my YT identity (which is deliberately blank, doesn't identify gender, etc.)

The fact that it's possible to get around this idiotic move doesn't mean that it should have been made in the first place.

Thank you for the suggestion -- it certainly would have worked out much better if that had been the procedure that I was initially presented with, rather than clicking a number of times to refuse the link (on multiple occasions, spanning weeks), and then having the link forced without my permission, and with no opt-out option visible.

Re: Dear Googles: G+/YouTube Anschluss – you've done outed me

#182

Post by wpietri »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #138
wpietri wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quora works surprisingly well with a real names policy. They let you post particular comments anonymously if you want. Then it's pretty obvious when people are using anonymity for good reasons and when they're just being dickish. There, community voting plus some moderation polices things pretty well.

Depends on what mean by "working well". I don't post on Quora nor do I read anything posted there because they don't let you read without logging in. I heard many others say similar things. That doesn't mean Quora isn't working well for you, but you should be aware of the fact that some who are willing to contribute in constructive ways are not contributing to Quora as things stand.

No, I have big issues with them requiring authentication to browse. However, I mean "working well" in the context of the point I was replying to. That is, they get a lot of good anonymous posts, but the real names policy plus some good policing keeps the bullshit [1] to a minimum.

[1] http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/greater-internet-fuckwad-theor...

Re: Dear Googles: G+/YouTube Anschluss – you've done outed me

#183

Post by chilldream »

sesqu wrote: post #139
chilldream wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people bombarding sections with ASCII art tanks, memes and protests against the G+ revamp. I have to say I've been amused at the people exploiting the combo of "no character limit" and "collapse button at the end of the post" by tacking public domain novels on the end of innocent-seeming posts.

>collapse button at the end of the post This one in particular confused me. I get that it's a common pattern, but I thought Google had UX people these days.

Man, I didn't.

Did you notice that if you get a notification about a video, and then click the notification to watch it, the video continues to play in that dinky little notifications feed taking up like 1/5th of the screen at most?

Did you notice that if you change your layout to single-column, the column is the exact same width as each column was in the two-column layout?

I use G+ for one community. I regularly can't find that community from the main page and have to type its name in the search box.

I can't talk about the new Gmail interface because I swore that off a long time ago.

Re: Dear Googles: G+/YouTube Anschluss – you've done outed me

#184

Post by graue »

graue wrote: post #94
adventured wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely agree on the copyrighted content problem. The VC issue is interesting. It would probably cost... hundreds of millions of dollars in capital over a few years to compete with YouTube properly (requiring HD, long length video), given the time it will most likely take to get up to speed on revenues / build a functioning business model, and the speed at which adoption often happens these days with successful…

> Snapchat, which thrived partially due to 'offensive' content Assuming you mean sexting, I think the percentage of sexually explicit images sent on Snapchat has been wildly exaggerated — by tech journalists looking for clicks, and by older folks not in Snapchat's target market who don't really get the point. Snapchat's appeal for everyday, non-sexual use seems to go over the heads of most tech people I know, but has…

Just found out some numbers do exist thanks to Survata: http://survata.com/blog/is-snapchat-only-used-for-sexting-we...

Their conclusion: a smaller percentage of Snapchat users use the service to sext than text-messaging users.

Re: Dear Googles: G+/YouTube Anschluss – you've done outed me

#185

Post by AndiS »

dictum wrote: post #12
graeme wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming your question was serious: Because she displays a very minor amount of cleavage in the picture, with a pleasant smile. In other words, her picture is fun and completely unobjectionable. Unfortunately, if that picture is shown outside of her private context it's also liable to generate hordes of crude come-ons from lonely men who see it while browsing Youtube. This is different from a facebook profile picture…

I understand her discomfort with harassers, but it seems to me that it's a trade between crude come-ons from people with real names attached and murder/rape threats from people without their real names attached. I prefer a web where pseudonyms are allowed, but if anything, real names could reduce harassment.

What Amagumori said -- I can block/delete harassing comments (and do, on a regular basis), but I am far more concerned with murder/rape threats from people who know where I live.

I'm a big girl, I can deal with crude come-ons appropriately (which is to say, snort/fume depending on the content, then report, block, and delete.)

What concerns me is the unwanted linking of trackable personal information, through a service that had been repeatedly declined by the user in question.

I'm thankful that I am not in compliance with Google's "real-name" policy, or else I'd potentially have harassers showing up at my door -- and that's a shitty, uncomfortable, violated feeling to be experiencing, because Google broke my trust after I told them that I didn't want to share that information, and they shared it anyway, without giving me a chance to opt out.

In this case, no actual harm was done. However, it illustrates the potential for harm very clearly -- when you require "real names" (and, in some cases, enforce that with requests for drivers-license scans, etc., as has happened a number of times since the G+ nymwars started), you must respect your users' privacy choices about how they want those names to be shared with the public.

All it takes is one stalker, one violent ex, one deranged family member, and their real-name policy, combined with the collapse of walls that users set up for self-protection, is a recipe for preventable tragedy.

Re: Dear Googles: G+/YouTube Anschluss – you've done outed me

#186

Post by AndiS »

codezero wrote: post #110

I feel like some people who claim they want privacy really don't value their privacy, but instead value something else (I hypothesize that it's just control) that seems like privacy. You can find this poster's name by using Google Image search to link to her Flickr then from there she has her domain registered with her full name and address. (this pattern is pretty common, by that, I mean, given some identifying info…

BTW, nothing like a casual doxxing on a public forum to make my point about the need for real privacy controls, and how unsafe lack of anonymity/effective pseudonymity on the web can make women, in particular, feel.

Congratulations, I've changed my G+ photo for the first time since I created the account.

Until now, I never felt uncomfortable having a photo of myself there, even though it meant that I had to deal with some small amount of unwelcome comments, and plenty of not-unwelcome flirty comments (which I'm fine with, I'm a flirty person, and I enjoy good banter. I'm not interested in anything more than that, and crude come-ons got deleted immediately, but I didn't mind the occasional complimentary exchange. If I'd had a problem with it, I would have used a different photo, or an image that didn't show my face.)

Google Image Search didn't exist at the time that I created my site, and my Flickr account also predated it.

You say that "anonymity is only effective if you practice consistent inconsistency" -- but if your goal is a persistent pseudonym which allows for ongoing human interaction over years, you're almost inevitably going to let some type of identifying information slip.

Your comment sounds suspiciously like victim-blaming in this case -- I never claimed to be an incredibly tech-savvy privacy specialist, I'm an an ordinary user of multiple online services and social platforms, and while my attempts to create walls between some of those identities may have been inadequate, they should have been respected.

I present as the same persistent pseudonym in most places, so it's fairly easy to track me through that method -- but that was deliberate, so that people could recognize my username cross-platform.

Since G+ was the one platform where I was doing a lot of public engagement with strangers, I chose a different nym, and deliberately didn't connect those identities. And, again, Google's products broke down those walls -- in this case, inspired by your actions rather than an automated merge, but still a privacy violation powered by Google.

No, putting a user's real name into YouTube isn't the whole of the problem. But it's a symptom of the contraction of identity that Google's products are forcing, even if users have actually taken active steps (and many people have taken more steps than I have, including creating multiple Gmail accounts under different identities) to try to protect their identity privacy and to keep their various online identities from merging.

Re: Dear Googles: G+/YouTube Anschluss – you've done outed me

#187

Post by AndiS »

rdl wrote: post #156

I think it's kind of offensive to refer to a product decision by a website as Anschluss; both because it implies Google's leadership are the Nazis, and because it trivializes the actual German/Austrian union (and thus beginning of WW2). Marginally more offensive than the "co-prosperity sphere" thing pinboardguy did.

To be clear, that wasn't my term (it was the title of a link that I reposted), but I agree with you -- I'd have personally chosen something with less of the weight of history and atrocity behind it.

Re: Dear Googles: G+/YouTube Anschluss – you've done outed me

#188

Post by AndiS »

isomorphic wrote: post #107

Am I the only one who finds it ironic that she's posting her criticisms from Google+? I'm not trying to be snarky or funny. Does she genuinely value her Google+ blog or associations or whatever more than the privacy she's so concerned about? She can, in fact, delete Google+ and keep Gmail. Try it. I have! Since Google supposedly runs on data, the only way Google is going to figure out their problems is if people dele…

G+ was my public-facing platform, the place where I engaged with people who I didn't know (most of my posts are public there.) It's separate from my normal online identity, deliberately (the people who read my friendslocked posts in my own space know about my G+ nym and profile, but I chose not to connect it to my normal nym and other personal information.)

I've found it to be an interesting, valuable, informative way to keep up with news, to meet people whose social spheres I wouldn't have otherwise encountered, and to have thoughtful, ongoing conversations. It's a space where I'm engaged in political, social, and specific-group-related commentary (gender and sexual minorities, disability-related discussions.)

I knew that, by using G+ publicly, I was giving up a carefully-considered amount of privacy -- but that was associated with a single nym, not my larger online identity.

Does Google know who I am? Yeah, sure. What I didn't want was Joe Public (or, worse, Joe YouTube) being able to track me cross-platform, which is why I never associated it with my normal persistent pseudonym or my other spheres of online activity.

I'm criticizing G+ from G+, because I'd love to see some changes made by Google. That's the best way I have of reaching an audience that includes Google employees, and it's also the platform where I've had the most frequent discussions of online privacy, etc.

Sure, I could try to go in and delete everything I've ever posted, now that Google has pulled its latest anti-privacy move. What, exactly, would that accomplish? It's still cached, and as various people will tell you, it's difficult to fully delete a G+ profile, unless you'd like to give up using all Google services (and I have yet to find a mail provider who gives me similar utility for free, or for a low price.)

I didn't mind the targeted ads in Gmail, they were the price I paid for using the service. What I do mind is the forced merging and integration of activities and nyms which users had repeatedly requested not be merged (I declined to merge my YT account repeatedly.)

Since I wasn't an active YT user, and I was able to re-link my YT profile to a dead-end G+ page after the fact, I have not been directly harmed.

But if I'd been someone who was an active YT content provider on a controversial subject, for example, or if I'd been outed in some way by the merge, or if I'd actually FOLLOWED Google's real-name policy and used my full legal name as they had wanted, there was certainly the potential for substantial harm to be done -- because that allows people to follow me (and other users) home -- both virtually and physically.

Google's convenience for data-marketing shouldn't outweigh personal safety or privacy concerns. I'm less distressed by their having the information available than I am with them sharing it with the public, after repeatedly declining their "offer" and not being given the option to opt-out.

The existence of a work-around (a dead-end "page") does not mean that the action was an acceptable one to take in the first place -- and it took a savvy user advising me of the work-around to cause me to look up how to do it . . . there wasn't an option for me to do so at the time they merged my accounts, which would have solved a lot of the related privacy concerns.

Re: Dear Googles: G+/YouTube Anschluss – you've done outed me

#189

Post by codezero »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #138
wpietri wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quora works surprisingly well with a real names policy. They let you post particular comments anonymously if you want. Then it's pretty obvious when people are using anonymity for good reasons and when they're just being dickish. There, community voting plus some moderation polices things pretty well.

Depends on what mean by "working well". I don't post on Quora nor do I read anything posted there because they don't let you read without logging in. I heard many others say similar things. That doesn't mean Quora isn't working well for you, but you should be aware of the fact that some who are willing to contribute in constructive ways are not contributing to Quora as things stand.

You can read anything on Quora if you add ?share=1 to the end of the URL.
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