As you might know, I am one of those people who were kicked from Google+ for using a pseudonym. Google is not about to change the policy, if you value your anonymity on the internet, Google+ is probably just not for you. But that might actually be a wise move anyway, because all Google+ seems to be is one big fat honeypot, designed to collect user’s real names and track their movements on the internet, to then sell your data to the highest bidder, or any bidder at all.
It’s reported that Google CEO Eric Schmidt replied to a question regarding the use of pseudonyms from the audience during a recent TV festival event in Edinburgh thusly :
He replied by saying that G+ was build primarily as an identity service, so fundamentally, it depends on people using their real names if they’re going to build future products that leverage that information.
Regarding people who are concerned about their safety, he said G+ is completely optional. No one is forcing you to use it. It’s obvious for people at risk if they use their real names, they shouldn’t use G+. Regarding countries like Iran and Syria, people there have no expectation of privacy anyway due to their government’s own policies, which implies (to me, at least) that Schmidt thinks there’s no point of even trying to have a service that allows pseudonyms.
This totalitarian outlook on a future internet is shared by an obscure agency in the USA putting together a “National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC)”, that envisions the internet as a “vibrant marketplace” with an identity ecosystem, but when I read up on how exactly they envision this, my association is more with an Orwellian scenario of complete lack of privacy, and total trackability :
For example, student Jane Smith could get a digital credential from her cell phone provider and another one from her university and use either of them to log-in to her bank, her e-mail, her social networking site, and so on, all without having to remember dozens of passwords. If she uses one of these credentials to log into her Web email, she could use only her pseudonym, “Jane573.” If however she chose to use the credential to log-in to her bank she could prove that she is truly Jane Smith. People and institutions could have more trust online because all participating service providers will have agreed to consistent standards for identification, authentication, security, and privacy.
Facebook is trying something similar with their Passport. And Google wants to get its share of this multi-billion dollar identity service business with Google+. That’s what it is about, collecting as many real names and tracking data as possible, not you doing social networking with your friends. Use at your own peril.
This is something I have been saying about Google for some time now. Their motto used to be, “Don’t be evil.” Now, it seems to be, “How evil can we be?”
The goal of the company is to collect as much information as they can about as many people as they can. Then they can sell their real product — that information.
I do not use Google for anything, email, search engine, nothing. Also, I use add-ons to block as many of their tracking software as I can. It would be nice if I thought this was 100% effective, but I doubt anyone can keep up with their spying.
I’m not under the impression that Google really know how they’re going to use the information they get; at the moment it seems to be mostly about ensuring that they don’t get left behind. Their goal has always been to, “organise the world’s information”, but to what end, it’s never been clear. Undoubtedly, they’ll use it badly, though.
Beyond technical gripes, my two biggest problems with G+ are the pseudonym policy and the hand-on policy they’ve adopted (the former perhaps being a symptom of the latter). These services have a habit of evolving to meet their users interests. Flickr began as a game but became a photo hosting service. Twitter began as a kind of web text messaging but most of the features that define Twitter were user-created and the service is becoming increasingly abstract and more of a backend tool. Facebook seems to be slowly turning into Steam-for-your-parents, given usage statistics (and despite Facebook’s efforts to diversify).
Meanwhile, Google seem to have decided for users what G+ is all about. The service hasn’t evolved much since it went up, it’s mostly just minor technical changes, while games were planned from the beginning. The pseudonym policy is outright hostile to existing online communities and vulnerable individuals. The poor integration of certain ‘social’ features is beginning to be addressed: +1 is no longer ghettoised but Sparks remain entirely algorithmic and impersonal and have a way to go. The pandering and grovelling to make it suitable for celebrities and businesses is alienating, to say the least. The overt pimping of Google’s other services has gotten worse, with the black toolbar now following you, no matter how far you scroll down the page. The whole thing is very austere and there’s no illusion that users have any real part to play in this service’s development and the ‘this is Google’s playground, like it or lump it’ PR sentiments are only making things worse.
I’d hope the service fails but then we’re still stuck with facebook and the only thing worse than a duopoly of douchebags is a monopoly of such.
+1ing this for irony.
Your interpretation of how the government’s National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) would handle this is completely upside down. NSTIC specifically calls out preservation of anonymity and pseudonymity online as key and calls for the ability for individuals to authenticate securely while still be anonymous. It’s one reasons why many privacy advocates have praised NSTIC as a way to properly balance security and privacy interests.