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

[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.