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.

[q10.livejournal.com]

also, what's your google+ handle?

[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...

[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.

[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.

[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. :)