After a steady stream of angry blog posts and heated debate among its own users over the value of pseudonymity on the web, Google announced Monday that it was revising its “real name” policy, at least for display, on Google+.
In a post on Google+, Google VP Bradley Horowitz promised greater transparency, particularly in suspension of user profiles. The new algorithm — human as well as computational — offers users a chance to correct their profiles before suspension. In the past week, most banned profiles simply disappeared without warning.
The great Google+ profile purge began last week with business and media company profiles: ABC News Radio, Sesame Street, Wired. This wasn’t a surprise: Google had stated that it wanted to limit the social network to individuals until it could set up special pages for businesses.
But after Google was accused of using its policy to play favorites — why was Boing Boing banned and Mashable spared? — nearly every company was kicked off.
Then the ban hammer came down on any and all profiles whose listed first and last names didn’t appear to match “real”/legal names: nicknames, mononym handles, even non-Roman names in Arabic or Chinese. If an account was flagged by another user as “fake” or “spam,” Google’s overwhelmed community monitors were overwhelmingly likely to suspend it.
Even before the great purge, Google+ users and bloggers were grappling with the social network’s “real names only” policy. It was always vaguely defined: not necessarily your full legal name, but “the name people usually call you in real life.” GeekFeminism blogger Skud (whose account under that name was eventually suspended from Google+) started a wiki list titled “Who is harmed by a ‘Real Names’ policy?“: The list included marginalized and disadvantaged groups, artists and writers who use alternate names in different contexts, and political activists and whistleblowers. Hack Education’s Audrey Watters wrote defending college and graduate students’ need for pseudonymity on the web, citing concerns about employment and reputation. Google’s Horowitz addresses some of these concerns directly in his post, under the heading of “myths” about Google+.
Many users were happy that Google was keeping unknown users off the web, arguing that it kept the quality of user interactions high, keeping Google+ relatively free from comment trolls, spammers or phishers. But others questioned Google’s motives, arguing that they simply did not want to furnish more of their personal information to Google than seemed absolutely necessary to use the service.
Why does Google+ want users’ real names? Dave Winer takes a realist view:
There’s a very simple business reason why Google cares if they have your real name. It means it’s possible to cross-relate your account with your buying behavior with their partners, who might be banks, retailers, supermarkets, hospitals, airlines. To connect with your use of cell phones that might be running their mobile operating system. To provide identity in a commerce-ready way. And to give them information about what you do on the Internet, without obfuscation of pseudonyms.
Simply put, a real name is worth more than a fake one.
This is why I’ve argued that Google+ is not only a social network: Social media here is a means to establishing identity. This is a tightly-related — but not an identical — business.
Google’s response aims to try to make social identification nearly as nuanced and granular as its approach to sharing content has been. Users can already add nicknames to their profile, as well as “other names”; according to Horowitz, these (along with your education, employment and occupation) will soon be searchable and appear in your G+ “hovercard” identifying you across all of Google — at least for those circles you choose to grant access to them.
This is similar to the company’s earlier decision to change gender — a mandated field that was intended in part to keep corporate profiles out of G+ — a private or public field, at individual users’ discretion. There’s no word yet that users will likewise be able to hide their full/”real” names, or display them only to selected circles. But that may be coming as well.
Let’s be clear, though: All of these changes affect only the public display of identity to other users and the open web. Google itself still wants your full identity, or at least as much identity information as possible. Other users may only get partial glimpses at your multiple and overlapping identities, as well as the information you share. Google gets everything.
Let’s contrast Google’s approach to identity with Facebook’s. Last year, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg drew ample criticism for his stance on identity and privacy.
The Zuckerberg identity-privacy quote that became famous was given to David Kirkpatrick for his bookThe Facebook Effect (emphasis added):
You have one identity… The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly…Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.
The second part of Zuckerberg’s defense of a unified identity isn’t mentioned as often, but it’s maybe only becoming fully illustrated now. He specifically contrasts Facebook’s approach to Google’s:
Let me paint the two scenarios for you. They correspond to two companies in the Valley. … On the one hand you have Google, which primarily gets information by tracking stuff that’s going on. They call it crawling. They crawl the web and get information and bring it into their systems. They want to build maps, so they send around vans which literally go and take pictures of your home for their Street View system. … Google is a great company, but you can see that taken to a logical extreme that’s a little scary.
On the other hand, we started the company saying there should be another way. If you allow people to share what they want and give them good tools to control what they’re sharing, you can get even more information shared. But think of all the things you share on Facebook that you wouldn’t want to share with everyone, right? You wouldn’t want these things to be crawled or indexed—like pictures from family vacations, your phone number, anything that happens on an intranet inside a company, or any kind of private message or e-mail.
This is one reason Fred Vogelstein wondered whether Facebook’s “(un)privacy revolution” might actually be a good thing for the web: Allowing users to share more of their information without worry of having it crawled and indexed by Google’s servers.
Google, on the other hand, has created a social network that allows you to offer multiple identities to others, while keeping all of that information, which was previously inaccessible to its identity engine, to itself. Under the banner of increased privacy and user control, it solicits information from you that, were it viewable by everyone in your networks, you would most likely keep to yourself.
Well, now we’ve given you almost everything, Google. Please don’t be evil.
Source: Wired
Posted in: G+,Google+
