Google+ anonymity

[asterroc]

So somebody I know recently sent me a thingit on Google+ reading as follows.

fyi, you might want to update your user name to your real name.

This individual was involved in the making of Google+, and ze's very gung-ho about it and about getting people to buy into it, and I think this was hir reason for leaving me that thingit. However, I wanted to share my response with the world that knows me by this pseudonym, so here it is.

No actually, I don't want to.

See my recent reshare of Randall Munroe's post and my comment on it. I don't want every friend of friend of friend to know everything about me. Even if I weren't internet unique (go ahead and Google my name, last I checked it took until page 6 to get any hits that weren't me), I still wouldn't want people I know nothing about to be able to stalk me, know my gender/sex (and start treating me differently because of it), have a pretty good guess at my ethnic background, and so on, just because I happened to comment on one of your posts or +1 a celebrity post. I don't want my students to search for me and find out everything about my politics and religion that I currently hide from them in person because if they knew they would dismiss every scientific fact I teach them because I'm a "radical." No, I don't want to put my real name in.

If Google had an option to hide my name from the world, or to only reveal it to certain circles, or even better yet to reveal my real name to some circles and a pseudonym to other circles, then yes, I'd put my full name in (and my pseudonym for the other circles). But as things stand right now, if people can't figure out from my initials and the bird icon who I am, then they don't need to know who I am and should be judging my words on their content, not the name attached to them.

Comments

[q10.livejournal.com]

i think this is the polite way of saying that you might want to because, if you don't, they will suspend your account.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Fine, then they can suspend my account.

[q10.livejournal.com]

also, what's your google+ handle?

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

I replied via LJ mail.

[calzephyr77.livejournal.com]

I got an invite and I'm poking around with it...I like that it gives an "other" gender choice, which I chose because I don't like to be bombarded with baby ads. Although I'm a big Google fan, I don't know how to feel about it just yet...

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

There's a lot about the circles and about how sharing works that reminds me of LJ, and this person told me that one of the major contributors to G+ was also a founder of LJ.

It's strange to me that they would understand people's desire for privacy enough to do things right with circles and sharing, but that they would be so anti-privacy as to require your gender and full name to be visible to everyone.

[calzephyr77.livejournal.com]

It is odd. I don't like how the web is leaning towards non-anonymous commenting. There's a thread on Metafilter from a few days ago about the name issue on Google+ with some interesting comments. What if your name has always been pseudomynous? Will it get to the point where more personal information will be used to verify who you are? It's such a slippery slope.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing that preventing anonymity is Google's way of trying to increase accountability and a sense of ownership of content. Doesn't make much sense to me though b/c the visibility of my real name means that I highly censor anything I put under my real name, so that I don't feel the same type of ownership of things I put under that name as opposed to under this name. This is the real me, that is just the face I show to other people.

saizai recently got his name legally changed to the mononym Sai - that is, "Sai" is his first, last, and only name - but since Google asks for a first and last name he had to put in "Sai ." with the extra "." in the last name box.

[calzephyr77.livejournal.com]

That's the trouble with these sorts of projects - no one accounts for the unique cases out there. There are some people who truly do have a last name that is one initial. The shortsightedness is surprising.

I still use my extremely unique maiden name in some cases and being that only name in the phone book has weirded me out to an extreme over the years. It was almost a blessing to get a married name as bland as Bennett. One of those YMMV things I guess - Bud has no such self-censorship and it's surprising the things he has left laying around online and where people are still finding them. I wish I had the same confidence!

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

I bitched to them about "gender must be public" via feedback because WTH, did they not learn about how poorly they comprehend the problems of being a woman on the internet from the Buzz fiasco? I've never had a problem with baby ads (possibly my very occasional browsing of "child-free" sites/posts helps with that), but frankly that is the least of my concerns.

The Randall Munroe link above is actually more about forced-public gender than about pseudonyms, and I fully agree with him on why using "other" for myself is problematic.

Here's a Geek Feminist post and a G+ post specifically on pseudonyms.

(Edited for HTML fail. Twice. My apologies!)

[calzephyr77.livejournal.com]

Oh, I should have mentioned this in my original post. You might like MiniGroup - http://www.minigroup.com which allows you to have different identities across groups.

No worries on the HTML fail!

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm aware that Munroe's link is about forced-public gender. My point is that forced publicness of any personal information is not good. People understand that forced-public age isn't good, so why not gender? All the reasons why people don't want their age public can be applied to gender, and then some, and IMO there are even more reasons why revealing your legal name is problematic.

Thanks for the links.

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

Ugh, blech.

And I'm sad to see that apparently, nobody involved in the process of building Google+ paid any attention at all to how diaspora decided to handle gender (a fill in the blank field, I believe, for all the right reasons), and more importantly, why.

[l0stmyrel1g10n.livejournal.com]

Will you let us know if/when that person responds to you? I'm curious to see what the result is.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

If ze does, I will, but I don't expect it.

[plinko.livejournal.com]

Well, I am certainly not going to use Google+ if they force me to use my name. FB was bad enough. I'm not making that mistake twice.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

They are enforcing that part of their TOS selectively.

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

The usual disclaimer: I work for Google (and for those of you out there wondering, I'm not the anonygoogler that zandperl referred to above) but I don't speak for them. I have been working on Google+ internals, though.

For a variety of reasons, I personally do not agree with the 'real name' constraint, nor do I agree with the requirement to make one's stated gender. All I can really say is that we're in early days for the product and there are many changes coming down the pike (some slower, some faster) which are moving things in directions that I like. So I hope that if Google+ isn't looking like what you want now, you'll keep an eye out for changes as they appear.

I'd also like to know your Google+ handle. Mine is my name, the only hard part is spelling it. :)

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

LJ mail sent w/ a link to my profile.