Stilgherrian shares the latest news on the #nymwars front – Google wants to be an identity management gatekeeper, and all those arguments about “real names” being more trustworthy are not just wrongheaded as many of us already knew, but are a disingenuous sham.
I had spent quite some time writing a lovely link-filled post with background for those of you who don’t already grok #nymwars (aka #plusgate), but the Internetz just ate it, and I don’t have time to write it again. Start here for extensive background.
Suffice to say that there are many non-sinister and prudently self-protective reasons to not use a name online that is tied to a physical address for one’s home or workplace, and such people are going to be not just inconvenienced but many actively disadvantaged and some actually endangered by being required to conform to an arbitrary and potentially ubiquitous requirement to use their wallet name on major networking services.
Since many techie “early adopters” fall into one or more of the categories who prefer to use pseudonyms online for a variety of reasons (especially those not blessed with Wasponyms), many initially enthusiastic G+ users have stopped using the site in disgust, so that traffic has dropping drastically over the last few weeks. Google remains intransigent.
P.S. it’s not just Google pushing for an end to pseudonymity in their paddling pool, either.
P.P.S. Any comments which fail to distinguish between anonymity and persistent pseudonyms go straight to the Trash. Educate yourselves.
Addit:
Cory Doctorow | The Guardian – Google Plus forces us to discuss identity
The first duty of social software is to improve its users’ social experience. Facebook’s longstanding demand that its users should only have one identity is either a toweringly arrogant willingness to harm people’s social experience in service to doctrine; or it is a miniature figleaf covering a huge, throbbing passion for making it easier to sell our identities to advertisers.
Google has adopted the Facebook doctrine at the very moment in which the figleaf slipped, when people all over the world are noticing that remaking ancient patterns of social interaction to conform to advertising-driven dogma exposes you to everything from humiliation at school to torture in the cells of a Middle Eastern despot. There could be no stupider moment for Google to subscribe to the gospel of Zuckerberg, and there is no better time for Google to show us an alternative.
The silly thing about Google’s real name policy is they have no real way of enforcing it. In effect its not a real name policy, but a policy which requires conventional names unless you have legal documentation proving otherwise. So anyone can have pseudonym on Google+, it just has to be a conventional looking name. There’s a big stink because not surprisingly some people are very attached to the nyms they’ve held for many years and don’t want to have be forced to create new ones.
Stilgherrian believes they want to be an identity service which may be true in the long term, but at the moment I think its not feasible to actually enforce.
I think there’s room for both what Stilgherrian believes Google want and pseudonymity. For example one solution would be that pseudonyms be backed by real names – so Google would know, but it would not be public. Another along similar lines would be to allow a pseudonym per circle – recognising that in practice people have quite separate social groups. Lots of very careful coding required though not to accidentally release too much information.
Charles Stross writes why he’s not on Google +, and the naming policy is a big part of it. It’s worth reading in total. But I’ll quote this section for the poor fools who can’t get their head around the anonymity versus persistent pseudonym dichotomy.
This ‘real name’ caper strikes me as extraordinarily tedious and petty on Google’s part, a bit like Facebook deleting breastfeeding photographs, or profiles where people had used an animal picture instead of the more typical head shot.
Ha – animal picture! Who does that?
With all the privacy and other concerns everyone seems to have with Facebook, I’ve been wondering why nothing has caught on that expressly avoids those concerns. It’s an open market, after all. Seems like Google + is not that alternative.
I’m not on Google+ because I have no idea what it does and so far haven’t felt that this is a problem.
Kymbos @5, this is a very good point. Surely this is a gaping hole in the market?
It did seem a very odd decision – and particularly with the bit about deleting accounts set up for businesses – why actively discourage enthusiastic early adopters? Surely they can just migrate such accounts later on to a business level if they really must distinguish between the two.
This seems the clearest enunciation of what it’s all about:
http://plus.google.com/117378076401635777570/posts/CjM2MPKocQP#117378076401635777570/posts/CjM2MPKocQP
The answer to the first question is very disturbing.
It’s like a lawyers interpretation of how the internet ‘went wrong’ by not enforcing identity in the first place (and how a lawyer would have done a better job). Rather than recognising the decentralised/untrusted nature was the primary reason it succeeded. The world already tried centralised ‘trusted’ closed networks, and it decided they didn’t want them: e.g. aol, or even more sadly microsoft’s ‘the internet is just a fad’ network.
People build trust by getting to know others and making their own decisions – you don’t trust someone just because they have government issued `identification papers’. i.e. trust (and security) is localised and personal, centralising it is less accurate, not as robust (single point of failure, single point of entry), and so on. Con-men can have a passport but that tells you nothing of their behaviour.
(i’m not talking about consumer-level commerce here, but there are other mechanisms to make that work already, and it seems to be quite healthy).
The rest sounds a bit broken actually – why should your social links have anything whatsoever to do with search results? That’s the last thing I’d want. Removing the subjectivity of people is the whole reason internet search is useful in the first place.
Also the bit about ‘well don’t use it if you don’t want to use your real name’ is a bit disingenuous if the search results are giving priority to some group of ‘more real’ people as identified by a centralised google database.
Denise is right when it comes to this constant argument that real names will somehow bring “civility” to internet discourse.
The Feathered one posts under his real name; I can think of several others right off the bat, but I don’t want to invoke them
“Phoebe Zeitgeist” commenting on Denise’s thread:
Sorry, last para is my comment – blockquotes borked.
…Commenter Parhelion gets what I was trying to say:
Helen, especially if you look at who’s most vigorously in favour of the real names policy.
One possibly useful benefit of this is that a lot more women are now talking publically about the nasty things that happen overwhelmingly to women and other identifiable minorites online. John Scalzi’s post “Crap I Don’t Get (he doesn’t get the crap, rather than not understanding why it’s bad) is a long thread that’s close to the definitive polite, respectful but absolutely not getting it version of this discussion. Some of the commenters are awesome. I suggest it because it is polite and pretty non-triggering, where a lot of the other discussions are all about really ugly things.