Google+ and identity (customer experience, rant)
If you're reading this, you probably know me as "fluffy." You might be aware of what my real name is (or at least my real first initial), but that's probably not the way you think of me in terms of my identity, unless you're one of the few real-life friends who calls me by my real first name (usually because you're a coworker or family member or the like).
I am of course now on Google+, but Google+ has done something insidious: they've taken the same route as other social networks where they champion the real name as being a much more valid identifier than the way that people actually know me. They've always required a "full" name (so I used the standby "fluffy <3" for that), but now they also specifically prevent non-letters in the fields. Sucks to be you if you're one of the people who have legally changed their name to a mononym or to include a numeral; also sucks to be you if you're one of the people who don't want to broadcast their real name to the Internet.
Google's public policy blog shows that they understand the need for pseudonymous identities, but they seem to have completely forgotten that such a need extends to Internet social circles (despite one of their top examples of such a need being Twitter). In particular, while most fields have a "restriction" field (to show who gets to see it), the real name field does not have such a restriction possibility. Just as with Facebook, your real name is your Internet name.
But even worse, when you change your name on Google+, that applies to all Google products, so suddenly GMail and Reader Shared Items and +1 and so on would refer to me by my legal name. I'm concerned that when my GMail for Domains account is finally merged with my apps account, suddenly my email will be sent with my Google+ name instead of my separately-configured email name. It'll also apply to any other identity-based Google services which may come about later. It's very insidious.
It's also a bit interesting how for all the talk they have about the fine granularity of "circles" for item sharing, they don't apply that granularity to the profile information. There's no way to restrict, say, your phone number or your mailing address only to your "friends" and "family" circles, for example — if someone is in a circle then they get all your information. Maddeningly, this is something even Facebook got right.
Oh well. At least they allow a gender of "other." For now, anyway. Who knows when some product manager will get a hair up their butt about being binary-normative.
See also: The case against drop-down identities, which I just found while searching for other thoughts on this issue. It's only going to get worse.
Comments
Also it's bloody annoying that they tied YouTube in with the rest of their system, now logging in to my old account there logs me out of whatever gmail or greader accounts i'm currently reading in other tabs.
Would pointing out the problem to them accomplish anything, do you think?
And yes, I suspect that the emphasis on true names is largely political, but also largely because of just some weird ideological basis on making the Internet reflect reality and vice-versa, because there's a lot of people who truly believe that anonymity is a DOWNSIDE to the Internet.
In the meantime, at least I still have access to the legacy account, although who knows what will happen to the data when (or even IF) migration is ever possible.
Such a stupid convoluted mess. Oh, and as a result of this crap I've also lost my various Google Reader connections, although I didn't do much with that anyway aside from sharing items into what was probably a giant unread black hole anyway.
Moxie Marlinspike was right.
I have the impression that there's currently an argument going on, among those who get to build (and therefore decide the future of) these things, about whether the web should be regarded as kinda like a place, or merely another form of communications system, like telephones or whatever. The latter group want everything anyone ever does online to ultimately always be traceable back to their true name, thereby abolishing online anonymity forever.
I'm firmly in the former camp.. obviously it's not literally true but it just seems to me to be a much more appropriate, fruitful metaphor to use for our online lives.. we talk about "visiting" sites, not "downloading the latest version of" them, for example.
This isn't a matter of degree, of quantity of evilness, but of quality -- one type of system is fundamentally ideologically incompatible with the goals of the other. We want online personas to be unconnectable to the human bod behind them, Facebook, Google+, etc just don't, apparently.
Google is more evil.
I've seen *tons* of techie people express similar sentiments to yours, and never quite understood what's behind them.
http://i.imgur.com/OlaR9.png
Google has the capability - in terms of technical R&D, capacity, and nerd-juice buy-in - to do far more damage than Facebook. They haven't, yet (unless you count their complicity in Chinese censorship). But they're a publicly-traded corporation, and are more subject to shareholder whims than to Larry Page's personal ethics. Not that I want to trust either.
Yes that was a long rambling paragraph to say I tried to complain but gave up because it was confusing.
Anyway, my take on the Google profile name policy is that the name has to identify you to your friends and cannot be used to impersonate someone else. As long as they don't require a LEGAL name, and don't remove the "other" gender option, I'm okay with it, although of course I'd prefer if the identifier be a bit more flexible and allow non-letters (and of course your identity is tied to R343L online so their current solution isn't workable for you).
Well, so much for that.
Incidentally, that is how "circles" effectively work. Making it even more of a shame that G+ is yet another place insisting on "real" identities overriding actual identities.