Google+ To End Real Names Policy 235
bs0d3 writes "After months of Google+ being unsuccessful at taking the edge over Facebook, Google announces a new plan. Google executive Vic Gundotra announced yesterday that they will be 'adding features that will "support other forms of identity,"' a major victory for security and privacy advocates. If Google+ gets rid of their 'real names' policy, they will finally be the social networking site that people will flock to when running away from Facebook."
JWZ is a skeptic; he describes as "premature victory" (and much harsher things, too) any rejoicing in the announced policy change, writing in part "My guess? I'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, meaning they're still fully prepared to roll over on you to authoritarian governments or advertisers at the drop of a hat."
I'll tell you how to get more users... (Score:4, Insightful)
If they really want more users then they should add profile support to Google Apps so the metric crap-ton of people who ALREADY PAY THEM MONEY can use Google+.
Re:jwz (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Finally.. (Score:5, Insightful)
No .... they are simply trying to disguise the problem in order to suck in more users. Contrary to whatever bullshit they try to spread, Google+, Facebook and all the rest will NEVER implement any policy that actually respects the privacy of users. It will never happen, because their business model depends on selling their users to advertisers.
Still not what we need (Score:5, Insightful)
Communication should be open and federated, yet private and protected by strong cryptography.
Communication is a human right.
Social networking needs to be seen as something other than an "app" or a trendy buzzword. Why can't we call it communication? Why can't we standardize a protocol for more robust communication than is offered by email?
Under proprietary services, you'll never be anything more than an identified consumer (even by pseudonym) on the corporate feedlot, for sale to advertisers.
There will always be a primary key, even if it isn't the same one issued to you by the government (legal name). This is Google - they'll hoover up your phone number, email, address, from you and your contacts, and identify you anyway. Don't kid yourselves. Unless you're a hardcore privacy geek, your friends will leak info, even if you don't. Google is letting you use a pseudonym because they know their datamining is so powerful that they can identify you anyway.
I don't mind sharing my life, but I'm not going to share it with an advertising conglomerate and any marketroid willing to cough up the required price.
The things people share on proprietary networks are shared with more unknown third party marketers than with their real, actual friends and family.
Stop filling out your own marketing profiles. Revolt. You are a human being, not a datapoint.
I'm a fake and proud of it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Finally.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:jwz (Score:3, Insightful)
Too Late (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Finally.. (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree. They've just been trying to take away Facebook users since it went public. A better strategy would be to look at the market and go after those who don't use Facebook, for one reason or another. Build a solid user base of people who wouldn't consider the alternative, then worry about picking off the competitor's customers. I would guess that most of the current users also have Facebook pages, so they'll default to that since it's the de-facto standard. Having a strong user base that will say, "No, get ahold of me on G+ b/c I don't have a Facebook page" is a much better strategy for keeping the network active. But Google didn't really give many good reasons for non-Facebook users to consider their network other than "We're not Facebook" until now, out of desperation.
At least it's a step in the right direction, but I'm sure G+ would have been doing much better had they originally tried to allow some form of anonymity. Just look at how many Slashdotters they could have pulled in from the start. These are heavy internet users and clicks are what counts.
I just don't trust them (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Still not what we need (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey look some 12 year old just saw fight club for the first time.
While that is funny.... he has made some quite excellent points:
1) Communication should be open and federated, yet private and protected by strong cryptography.
Wow. Kind of hard to disagree with that at all. Spot on so far....
2) Communication is a human right.
Is there anybody that is really going to fight this point at all?
3) Social networking needs to be seen as something other than an "app" or a trendy buzzword. Why can't we call it communication? Why can't we standardize a protocol for more robust communication than is offered by email?
No. Fucking. Shit.
Right now, Social Networking is derided by quite a few of us here on Slashdot because we don't see it as useful communication. I still see it's use as nothing more than sharing of worthless information and tweets about stuff I don't really want to know. Signal to Noise ratio is not good. Other than some funny pictures and a quips about your daily life, it is just a gaming portal.... Farmville... need I say more?
It should be communication. Email needs to die, it has served its purpose. Right now, it is just a huge drain on resources since 90% of resources used are to fight SPAM. Sending data through it requires Base 64 encoding, which is the most hilariously inefficient form of data transfer on the planet. I find it useful because it can change any data to be "safe" for transfer between processes mainly because none of the characters inside it are picked up by compilers, interpreters, etc. XML fields wrapped in CDATA can still fail.
4) Under proprietary services, you'll never be anything more than an identified consumer (even by pseudonym) on the corporate feedlot, for sale to advertisers.
Is anyone disagreeing with that? It's true. Whether or not you care about is a different argument.
5) There will always be a primary key, even if it isn't the same one issued to you by the government (legal name). This is Google - they'll hoover up your phone number, email, address, from you and your contacts, and identify you anyway. Don't kid yourselves. Unless you're a hardcore privacy geek, your friends will leak info, even if you don't. Google is letting you use a pseudonym because they know their datamining is so powerful that they can identify you anyway.
Also true. Data mining has become a new field and a new market. Even if you don't participate, what you are is extrapolated from information provided by people you know. Almost impossible to fight.... unless you don't want to have any life at all.
6) I don't mind sharing my life, but I'm not going to share it with an advertising conglomerate and any marketroid willing to cough up the required price.
Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. You want to control who knows what about you. It's called privacy, and deriding the ability to share information with a friend without having it spread across the whole world, intelligence communities, and marketing groups is not fair, and wanting it is not indicative of a tin foil hatter.
7) Stop filling out your own marketing profiles. Revolt. You are a human being, not a datapoint.
Why not? Why should you be penalized for having a life by constant bombardment by advertisers and governments profiling you?
I don't think you should.
The day I join Social Networking is when I can host my own personal P2P SNS that does not allow any huge corporation like Google to analyze my personal data and relationships.
It's not easy. It will take time, development, and testing. We can get there and take true control over our communications and turn ISPs into what they were always intended to be... common carriers.
Anonymous still isn't anonymous (Score:5, Insightful)
>"I'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, meaning they're still fully prepared to roll over on you to authoritarian governments or advertisers at the drop of a hat."
And even if they didn't, it still wouldn't matter. Google can and would likely use its massive infrastructure to track down who each "unnamed" user is and place an identity on each "in the background". It has been proven over and over again that it can be done. Photo recognition, IP addresses, browser cookies, access behavior, linked accounts, phone numbers, etc, etc, etc. With enough CPU power and data (both of which Google has) it won't take them long to correctly identify many such pseudo-anonymous users.
Still, it is a huge victory if they would at least let people use screen names.