

Google+ and Privacy: A Roundup - randomwalker
http://33bits.org/2011/07/03/google-and-privacy-a-roundup/

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thristian
"Some people are peeved that Google+ discourages you from participating
pseudonymously. I don■t think a social network that wants to target the
mainstream and wants to capture real-world relationships has any real choice
about this."

I'm not going to argue for full-on bullet-proof pseudonyms, because I'm sure
that would just be a matter of creating multiple accounts. The issue I have
(and a wide variety of the "privacy conscious early adopters" using the
system, I'm sure) is smaller: there's people I've been hanging out with online
for the better part of a decade, and I know them by their pseudonyms. Google+
gives me a list of names I only barely recognise, instead of the familiar
handles I've come to associate with these faces. Likewise, it would be nice if
my user tile could show up in my parent's Circles with my given name, and my
online friends' circles with my handle.

As another example, I have some friends of Chinese descent who have a "Chinese
name" given to them by their parents, and an "English name" they use in non-
Chinese-speaking contexts for the benefit of people who are inexperienced at
pronouncing Chinese words. Their _real-world relationships_ use very different
names, but G+ forces them to pick only one.

A long-standing HN favourite post is patio11's "List of wrong assumptions
programmers make about names", and one of the items on that list is "A person
has exactly one name that they go by". This is exactly the assumption that
Google+ makes, and it's just as wrong as ever. Circles is a great model for
real human networks, but it doesn't go far enough: a single person can quite
legitimately be known by different names in different social contexts.

As for myself, I've changed my Google Profile's "name" field to reflect my
usual psuedonym, because more than half of my current G+ contacts know me that
way. But I'll keep complaining about it, because I think it's an important
part of human society that is being overlooked.

~~~
antrix
> Their real-world relationships use very different names, but G+ forces them
> to pick only one.

G+ profiles have nicknames. Wouldn't that be suitable for this scenario?

~~~
thristian
As far as I can tell, the "Nickname" and "Other names" fields are only
displayed in the profile; there's no way to say "this should be the name
displayed by my posts/in the Circles view/whatever"

~~~
X-Istence
Send a suggestion using the feedback button to Google. They have been really
open to hearing from people and listening to feedback about various bugs and
usability.

------
nextparadigms
_"Another reason why Google+ competes with distributed social networks: for
people worried about the social networking service provider (or the
Government) reading their posts, client-side encryption on top of Google+
could work. The Circles feature is exactly what is needed to make encrypted
posts viable, because you can make a circle of those who are using a
compatible encryption/decryption plugin. At least a half-dozen such plugins
have been created over the years (examples: 1, 2), but it doesn’t make much
sense to use these over Facebook or Twitter. Once the Google+ developer API
rolls out, I’m sure we’ll see yet another avatar of the encrypted status
message idea, and perhaps the the n-th time will be the charm."_

I really like this idea. I hope they even implement it themselves so you can
encrypt the data yourself on certain circles.

I also agree that Google+ so far seems that it _could_ threaten not just
Facebook, but also Twitter and Linkedin and maybe even personal blogging
(Tumblr, Posterous, Blogger, and Wordpress to a lesser degree)

It could become a publisher platform too if they create a good way to monetize
the content without being spammy. Chris Brogan suggested affiliate links. I
was also thinking they could allow you yo use your own Adsense id on the
_page_ of the post.

But they should think all these things through before they implement them. Oh,
and I'm STILL waiting for content search within Google+, the way Twitter
search works.

~~~
mike-cardwell
Regarding encryption. Google+ with such a plugin wouldn't fix the fundamental
problem. We don't need "encryption for geeks", we need "encryption for
everyone".

Until we have a social network where every message posted is only viewable by
the sender and the intended recipients, there will always be room for
improvement.

~~~
baq
google is in an excellent position for this: they "only" have to assign a
keypair to every profile. there's a small problem in that the private key
would have to be stored in their cloud for good usability, but it's otherwise
possible.

~~~
mike-cardwell
They're not going to do that though because of their commercial interests. And
a key stored by the service provider is equivalent to a service provider
storing the data unencrypted and promising to not look at it. Just like
Dropbox.

------
olliesaunders
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all those started life as experiments and
evolved to become what they have today. Google+ is the first product I’ve seen
that is designed and implemented in the acknowledgement of the outcomes of
those experiments, having made some mature decisions about what it is people
actually want from social networking. I feel like the web is finally starting
to grow up.

~~~
city41
Much like the Google search engine was a calculated and intelligent response
to Lycos, Altavista, Infoseek, etc.

~~~
dspace
And Gmail was a calculated and intelligent response to Hotmail and Yahoo!
Mail?

~~~
city41
Actually, yeah. I guess "coming last but being awesome" is one of Google's
tactics.

~~~
olliesaunders
Hm, yeah. Wave being an exception and considerably less successful.

------
mattdeboard
Arvind, I had JUST published a blog post on this very topic, though not nearly
as articulate or in-depth, when I saw this. All very well said indeed, and
agree on all fronts.

I think all can agree that Circles is a great technology; the struggle for
Google is going to be 1. convincing most of the world that there is an
alternative to the all-or-nothing default of Facebook, and 2. that it is good.
Great write-up.

