I think anonymity on the internet is a great thing. It's a place where you can socialize and share ideas with strangers without having to give them your name/address/home phone #. You can even start honest, more controversial discussions and do some high-level reasoning that you couldn't necessarily achieve with close friends.
If Google won't allow that on their services anymore, I pray everyone leaves them & moves to services that understand this. The market giants think they can bully us into behaving the way they want us to rather than realizing that they are privileged by having our business. I would recommend giving business to alternative sites as much as possible to break internet monopolies that are setting the stage for these forceful policies.
I don't think everyone has to leave Google for you to have productive anonymous discussions. For what it's worth, I think reputations (under anonymous usenames) are A very important component in having accountability and quality in discussions.
Can you imagine HN working if people were required to put their name and job titles ? Just because someone works for Microsoft for example does that make their support or criticism of the company any less valuable. Or what about all the political discussions where there could be legitimate fears of reprisal by government agencies.
Quora works surprisingly well with a real names policy. They let you post particular comments anonymously if you want. Then it's pretty obvious when people are using anonymity for good reasons and when they're just being dickish. There, community voting plus some moderation polices things pretty well.
Depends on what mean by "working well". I don't post on Quora nor do I read anything posted there because they don't let you read without logging in. I heard many others say similar things.
That doesn't mean Quora isn't working well for you, but you should be aware of the fact that some who are willing to contribute in constructive ways are not contributing to Quora as things stand.
No, I have big issues with them requiring authentication to browse. However, I mean "working well" in the context of the point I was replying to. That is, they get a lot of good anonymous posts, but the real names policy plus some good policing keeps the bullshit [1] to a minimum.
It's not even necessarily always anonymity, but about being able to break the most obvious links.
It's easy to find my name from my HN userid. If you google it, my first name comes up tied to other accounts.
But if you search for my name, HN does not come up on the first page at least.
Nevertheless, I'm sort-of conscious that what I post on HN is easy to tie to me real-world.
On Reddit, I use another username. Not because I'm particularly worried about individuals making the connection - if you look through my comment history on Reddit, it is fairly trivial to figure out who I am. The other direction is slightly trickier, but probably not much.
But I don't want someone just casually typing my name into Google to get page up and page down with comments I have made in what amounts to casual conversations.
That Google does not appear to understand that compartmentalisation is part and parcel part of social interaction, and that people put an enormous amount of effort into adjusting their identity for different situations, or if they do understand choose to willingly and knowingly ignore it, says heaps about the company. I don't know which alternative is worst, but it's one more reason to tell the Google recruiters to go away next time they call...
> Just because someone works for Microsoft for example does that make their support or criticism of the company any less valuable.
It does not make it less valuable, but it does change how we interpret it. If I found myself commenting on my current (or previous) workspace, I'd feel obligated to disclose my relationship.
It's so much more than this, though. Even if you're ethically obligated to disclose your relationship with your workplace when discussing said workplace, are you ethically/legally obligated to connect your identity to your views on education policy, or on criminal incarceration, or on musical genres, or on the future of a programming language that happens to be your boss's favorite programming language? To reduce it to company criticism is to create a straw man out of the entire case for anonymity.
Now, all this said, I fully expect to be "doxxed" publicly at some point on my various accounts, so I keep that in mind when making commentary, and I hedge my bets. The fact that it was Google that has prevented me from discussing things on YouTube without doxxing myself, though, is truly disappointing. Maybe they're not losing any money by losing commenters like me, but if I'm ever inspired to create viral content that could make ad money, Vimeo's getting that ad money now.
Disclosing your relationship to a company in a comment is a fair sight less than disclosing your identity to that company in the same comment. Particularly if you're a current employee.
To those tempted to downvote/report for the domain name and its connotations, the linked comment is actually insightful. I'll copy-paste an excerpt here to archive/make this available to viewers who might not want to click; please direct any upvotes to the parent.
> I do think there's some truth to the idea that anonymity can put more focus on content than the creator. If you make something that's good enough to get you a decent-sized fanbase, and you use a recognizable identity, people are more likely to be forgiving of weaker work you make in the future. If an online community already has recognized favorite content creators, that also makes it extremely hard for new people to come in and get recognized for their own content. Basically, a community based in anonymity can override the whole "argument from authority" fallacy, because no one has any authority. Anonymity is an equalizer. It can even benefit people who would normally do well even with an identity, because it leaves them free to experiment without being criticized for deviating from their earlier work.
yes totally down with username reputation IF one chooses that path... i like HN setup for example, may not stick around on a site where there are totally anon comments. But that said, if people want it it should exist.
The reason I say leave Google is simply because if we don't support platforms that work along the lines we want them to, they may not exist. People despise Facebook's policies, yet they stay on it because "there's no other choice". So my point was that we kindof just need to nut up & stop using platforms that we feel don't respect our wishes. If I had some videos to post I'd prob put them on Vimeo. With video posting, it's not really an all-or-nothing situation like Facebook. It's a technical need, not a social network.
You're missing 50% of the picture here. Anonymous, unmoderated discussion in an uneducated crowd is the worst of both worlds. Obviously.
But anonymous, moderated discussion in a forum of disciplined and/or informed, educated users is better than the same discussion in a forum where all the identities of the participants are known, precisely for the reasons fat0wl outlined. You can look to any of the heavily moderated reddit communities for a great demonstration of this (AskScience, /r/sex, /r/fitness etc). Even cherry-picking the good parts of 4chan will make it blatantly obvious that anonymity, in a controlled setting, is a very good thing for the level of discourse.
The comment quality on many of these forums far surpass anything that you will see on politically correct Facebook, which is the opposite end of the spectrum: Most people, apart from a few loudmouths, will be exceedingly polite and well-behaved when all their friends are watching. And this leads to poor debate and boring discussion.
Even on Hacker News, I would refuse to contribute if I had to post with my full name. There are many reasons for this, but the biggest is simply that I do not wish future employers to be a Google search away from a detailed record of all my personal, political and professional opinions. This is simply a reflection on the fact that the reality of public discourse has changed in the world of search engines. Anonymity (pseudonymity) and moderation is the only way to resolve this problem.
In short, Google has the complete wrong idea. Which is actually quite shocking; Google should know better than anyone the realities of public discourse on the Internet.
"Google should know better than anyone the realities of public discourse on the Internet."
Google wants to extract the most money possible from each HTTP request. Knowing how to bill you (credit card, cell number, etc.) is a really good way of doing that.
Personally I think the problem is the concept of comments in the first place. You see, way back in the day, if you wanted to respond to a post or whatever on the web you went to your own website and posted a response and linked to the source you were responding to. Comments sections on websites are data islands; comments and conversations held captive in walled gardens. Youtube is the biggest irony of all as it has the concept of video responses, yet they prefer you to respond in tiny teeny little comment boxes. I say scrap the comments section and prove a big red "record a video response" button next to each video.
Of course I appreciate the irony of my comment about comments appearing on a site with comments, but I've always regarded sites like hacker news and slashdot as "forums where the post is a link to an article".
I'd much prefer it if everyone has a wordpress site or equivalent and posted their opinions on that. At least the web would be more webby and you wouldn't have greedy centralised sites gobbling up content and demanding control of the conversation.
"way back in the day, if you wanted to respond to a post or whatever on the web you went to your own website and posted a response and linked to the source you were responding to."
Amen. I still do it this way most of the time. Too bad the Web has not standardized on a form of pingback - that would allow these distributed conversations to actually work. Right now we're stuck with looking at our referrer logs, and that is very clumsy.
I keep asking this question and getting no response, so I'll ask it again:
Is there any evidence that any site anywhere has seen an uptick in comment quality by requiring real names?
Anecdotally, any time I see a news website with Facebook Connect the comments are still swill. While I'd be willing to consider evidence to the contrary, I think this is a false correlation. Observing that anonymous comment threads tend to have more swill than social network threads says nothing. People act more like they would in real life on Facebook because Facebook has always tried to tie your online identity with your meatspace identity. Slapping real names on YouTube accounts makes them easier to stalk, and possibly easier to humiliate outside of the site, but it doesn't stop them from being a conglomerate of barely-literate human beings who are strangers to almost everybody and will rarely interact with each other more than once.
> The problem is that anonymity leading to great conversation is disproved by reality.
How ironic that you are posting this on Hacker News.
Or pick reddit for another flagrant counter example to your claim.
Uncivilized discussions don't happen because of anonymity but because of uncivilized people. Create forums where mature people are inclined to participate and you will get great discussions, whether these posts are authored by anonymous people or not.
> Create forums where mature people are inclined to participate and you will get great discussions, whether these posts are authored by anonymous people or not
No doubt that works well in some cases, but the average YouTube video is not such a forum.
Google has a problem ("The comment section on many YouTube videos is an insane cesspool"), and they need to address that problem. They don't really have the option of just moving the goalposts.
Moderation is another option that can work, but it may not be practical with something as enormous as YouTube.
They certainly could have done a better job of this, because the reaction is fairly predictable (people go insane over far more minor changes... OMG-CHANGE!1!), but it doesn't seem an unreasonable move in the abstract.
> No doubt that works well in some cases, but the average YouTube video is not such a forum.
Yes, and that's the mistake that Google is making: thinking the problem is procedural ("Just have people log in with their real name") instead of social.
I'm not sure what the best solution is but their current one is obviously wrong. Maybe they could start by doing a better job at sorting/upvoting/downvoting so that only the best comments get shown on the front page and not the most recent ones.
If anything, at best this has left the comment quality unchanged. Now you have people bombarding sections with ASCII art tanks, memes and protests against the G+ revamp.
Personally I don't think YT comments, for all their vulgarity and chaos, required any "solution". They were cesspools, but ultimately cesspools of humanity. There is absolutely no reason one couldn't ignore them if they found them so distressing.
yea they were fun to look at if you were looking for a possible laugh but really -- what do you expect from a single public chronological thread on a (possibly dumb to begin with) video viewed by millions?
if they were so desperate to give it value why not just make it display based on some algorithm (top comments or some hacker news-ish setup). they approached it in a completely uninspired way. Violating everyones privacy is not some dream solution. it seems more like "Plan D"....
> people bombarding sections with ASCII art tanks, memes and protests against the G+ revamp.
I have to say I've been amused at the people exploiting the combo of "no character limit" and "collapse button at the end of the post" by tacking public domain novels on the end of innocent-seeming posts.
Did you notice that if you get a notification about a video, and then click the notification to watch it, the video continues to play in that dinky little notifications feed taking up like 1/5th of the screen at most?
Did you notice that if you change your layout to single-column, the column is the exact same width as each column was in the two-column layout?
I use G+ for one community. I regularly can't find that community from the main page and have to type its name in the search box.
I can't talk about the new Gmail interface because I swore that off a long time ago.
If you don't want to watch the video, the gist is that the G+ integration is actually highlighting the worst comments and putting them at the top, since they are the ones that get the most replies/likes/dislikes (feeding the trolls, etc.).
Has the quality of the comments gone up? No. Now, they are giving people who don't mind bullying people under their own name access to people that dare to call them out on their shitty behavior.
Edit: is the quality of the comments on sites like 9gag or those others that use the facebook comment system better than that of youtube that they should've felt inspired to make this move? Is it less racist,misogynistic or less of any kind of hate towards anyone?
Having a Google plus account linked to YouTube with real name policy has not stopped the trolls and poisonous commenters. They have just carried on as usual. Now it has just made it easier with spammers, blackhats now able to leave links on their comments. Sure they can be deleted with an hour or so but that one hour is all you need to spread your payload.
The only people who the real name policy punishes is the real users. The ones who do everything right. The ones who do not wish to have their lives outed this way.
Now I'm gay, and have no problem being out online but at home in public is another problem. I've never moved from my Childhood home and I live in a small town, its pretty easy to know who I am, so I made it a policy to never link the two so I don't have to do deal with Homophobia on my Doorstep. Its a small town and news soon spreads. I don't have a Google Plus account and am moving away from Gmail for this reason. I never ever use a real photo online. Facebook is only used for minor things on an anonymous email address with a blank photo. Even then I hate it and do not use it for personal stuff.
If you are really concerned about privacy, just delete your Gmail, Google Plus account. Get your wallet out and move to a paid alternative where you will not have to worry about having your email connected to a social network. Buy a domain name, use a private whois service like at NearlyFreeSpeech.Net so you can move between providers over the years but keep the same address.
If you really must comment on YouTube, create a Google Plus profile on a brand new Gmail account for those exact purposes. Understand that anything you write online can be traced back to you. We are not anonymous despite if you never use a real name. Google knows more about you and your interests than any other entity and it has years of your surfing and searching habits in its database.
Edited to add, if you hate the comments on your own YouTube videos, just turn them off.
Never saw the issue with YouTube comments. Always was much ado about nothing. So people were immature - it's funny. So people were insulting - grow up, they're having fun.
This whole movement to control YouTube comments reeks more of management's personal embarrassment that their customers weren't as serious and high class as they. Again, grow up. Not everyone is like you - not even your customers.
On a point I agree but not everyone has a thick skin to deal with the constant abuse some YouTubers face and they shouldn't have to.
But ultimately I believe the whole policy of linking Google Plus account to YouTube was to clean it up so it looks good for advertisers. They do not want their brand associated with some of the homophobic, sexist and racist comments some were posting.
The thing is, Facebook already proved that hateful people will happily spout bigotry and threats next to their real name and a photo of themselves. I can't believe Google isn't aware of this.
>Never saw the issue with YouTube comments. Always was much ado about nothing. So people were immature - it's funny. So people were insulting - grow up, they're having fun.
It's a splinter/beam problem: the flaws in a community you don't participate in or give a shit about are always massive and terrible and the benefits of that community continuing to exist are always worthless and nonexistent.
Like maybe youtube comments were as shit as everyone says they were, but all I - and most people who say youtube comments were shit - knew about youtube comments was a couple of notable high-profile examples that, really, weren't any worse than the shittier grade of comments you get everywhere on the internet.
Also, people are different in different situations. People are different on youtube than they are on tumblr than they are on pinterest than they are on twitter than they are with their family than they are at the DMV than they are at a night club than they are ....
People aren't a personality attached to a name they're who they want to be at any given time and personalities change.
This kind of forced identity is not only dangerous for at risk individuals but is plainly anti-social and anti-human-behavior.
This is rather insightful. Now I'm actively considering changes in my personality based on different social interactions. I wonder if enjoyment of various activities is contingent upon the personality one puts on while engaging in them. Which raises the question, what if any parts of our personality are consistent throughout all activities.
I've got an especially unique last name as well. So much so that I'm absolutely sure nobody in the world has my full name, and, as far as I'm aware, it's possible my dad and I are the only people in the united states with the same first/last name (of the 7 total on facebook, only 3 are in North America). My brother and sister are in a similar boat, thanks to unique spelling of their names. From my last name alone, I'm sure you could track me down with just that and the information that I've been on hacker news.
Probably because of that, I've always been fairly paranoid about using my actual name on most things online, but graduating from a college, participating in research, and having a facebook account pretty much made it impossible to ever be truly anonymous.
My daughter specifically avoided creating a Facebook account until she went to university -- however, one of her classes had meetings which were calendared and discussed on a private FB group, so she had to join in order to participate in the class.
She used an alias that would be recognizable to her classmates -- but, like you, she didn't want her legal name to be easily searchable by prospective employers, health-insurance companies, estranged family members, bad-breakup exes, etc.
But, yes -- having a unique name makes anonymity and privacy more complex. And it shouldn't -- it penalizes people for the name they were BORN with, just because they can't blend into a sea of Bob/Joe/Sue/Tran/Wei names, which are more common.
The ability to create a persistent pseudonym and to use it for unmuzzled online discourse is especially vital for people who would be all-too-easy to track down otherwise . . . but I think that it's still essential in terms of free-speech and privacy concerns for everyone.
Yeah, this issue actually drives me crazy. I liked using Google+ as sort of a blogging platform, and I constantly linked to a lot of videos from youtube. (I've never had a youtube account, never posted a comment).
So, the other day, I link to a video I found interesting, and I notice I'm getting a lot more comments than usual. Problem is, they are all along the lines of "OMG, Why are idiots continuing to use hash tags" or "WTF man, who gives a shit about this video"
Just pure vitriol, where before the people who actually followed me on Google+ were at least respectful. As a result, I've basically resigned to not posting anything from youtube anymore because there is no way to disassociate yourself with the people who visit youtube.
Seems like an opportunity for a browser plugin designed to enforce pseudonymity. You can already create different pseudonymous identities via cookie management or different user profiles.[1]
The problem with this approach is that it's inconvenient to keep switching back and forth. And all it takes is one inadvertent click to irreversibly associate your two pseudonyms. This is where a plugin could help. Basically, it just comes with very basic set of rules -- if YouTube, I am X; if Gmail, I am Y; else I am Z. For bonus points, integrate with Tor.
Anyone know of something like this already? Might be a fun weekend project otherwise.
This time, they are putting sleazy pop-ups in ways where you'll accidentally click on the thing that connects the accounts. They might get away with it, because technically you're giving them consent when you click "OK".
I think Google is choosing a particularly terrible point to start alienating users of YouTube. It seems like everywhere I go online these days, the YouTube hatred is universal. It's regarded as uncool, boring, obnoxious, and just generally yesterday's news. This is merely an observation, however a few years ago I rarely saw the kind of negative sentiment toward YouTube that is now very common.
If I were a betting person, I'd say that YouTube's days as the champ of their segment of the online video world is nearing an end. They'll straggle on with massive volume, courtesy of the barrier to entry that is the cost of streaming zillions of petabytes, but their product will be strongly disliked, and competitors will flourish. I believe users are desperate for a high quality alternative at this point.
I personally don't see that YouTube presents an overwhelming value proposition any longer, compared to the hassle that it's becoming. As it is now, I use a separate browser, in incognito mode, to view YouTube because they're scumbags about trying to force a connection.
Youtube's strength has never been as a portal, but as infrastructure. They tried feeding video bloggers with video responses (though that feature is going away), there are channels, which were always terrible to navigate, and there is of course the cesspool of comments. Youtube grew huge because it was easy to embed stuff and link to and upload with.
So what's the high barrier to entry that you're talking about? Vimeo has its creative community and Wistia has great embedding tools, but what other sort of niches do you see popping up that steal power users away from Youtube? What sort of business plans even make sense without Google's infrastructure and deep pockets?
The bandwidth issue is a small obstacle for a potential competitor (solvable by venture capital) relative to the issue of video copyrights and offensive content moderation.
I definitely agree on the copyrighted content problem.
The VC issue is interesting. It would probably cost... hundreds of millions of dollars in capital over a few years to compete with YouTube properly (requiring HD, long length video), given the time it will most likely take to get up to speed on revenues / build a functioning business model, and the speed at which adoption often happens these days with successful products (wake up tomorrow with 50 million users wanting to stream your brains out).
We live in the age of pervasive offensive Internet content. Reddit is half offensive content, and then there's Tumblr and Snapchat, which thrived partially due to 'offensive' content. I view that as a trivial problem.
Whatever replaces YouTube, will likely be built on the back of sensationalistic offensive content. Nothing sells like sex / sex appeal, and that will never change. Indeed, people get accustomed to it, and then it takes even more dramatic content to get that sensationalism buzz.
> Snapchat, which thrived partially due to 'offensive' content
Assuming you mean sexting, I think the percentage of sexually explicit images sent on Snapchat has been wildly exaggerated — by tech journalists looking for clicks, and by older folks not in Snapchat's target market who don't really get the point. Snapchat's appeal for everyday, non-sexual use seems to go over the heads of most tech people I know, but has been described eloquently by, e.g., Nathan Jurgenson[1] and Dustin Curtis[2].
Porn on Tumblr and sexts on Snapchat make for interesting headlines, but I'd hesitate to credit either as a major reason for the platform's success without actual numbers on its prevalence. To my knowledge those numbers don't exist.
This is the feeling I get too. We try to host content on YouTube due its reach, but a lot of our content creators (and viewers) have requested that we use Twitch instead. Esp. for its xbox integration. (We're a gaming site btw)
The YouTube/Google+ integration would have been much smoother if it started by giving every existing user a G+ "Page" identity matching their YouTube name, and making that page their default YouTube identity. From the user's perspective there would be no risk of accidentally connecting their legal name to YouTube, and Google would have achieved their goal of a unified login system.
This. It's too bad Google conflated their technical goal of a unified login system with their policy goal of whatever-their-policy-goal-is — probably something to do with knowing more about their users and/or getting them to interact with social features more.
Which is pretty funny to me, because this flat-out guarantees that I will not use their social features. As a currently non-transitioning trans woman, there are a great many YouTube videos that I enjoy but absolutely can not have associated with my legal name.
I understand how unsafe and unsettled that must make you feel, and I hope that you are able to continue enjoying YouTube without endangering and/or outing yourself. Good luck.
In other words: exactly what the much maligned Yahoo did when integrating acquired services into Yahoo. They may have done a lot of things right, but they did that part right.
You kept your original identity, and the single sign-on was a private matter, you didn't get publicly "outed" as Yahoo user FirstName LastName.
What is the frequency with which these prompts to connect show up? I use youtube daily, G+ not at all and I've only seen them twice. These instances were at least a few months apart. In both cases, I opted out of connecting my profiles and nothing has happened since. Are some people getting these prompts more often? Why? Maybe someone on the G+ team can explain this.
without deleting my entire G+ account and profile
I don't use G+/FB but even if I did, I have a hard time understanding this mentality. I wouldn't think twice about deleting any of social media profiles and even in places like HN where it's not possible to delete profiles, I just throwaway old profiles and start from scratch. Maybe I'm just paranoid but the last thing I want are my random musings being psychoanalyzed by nutters on the internet.
And as far as Gmail goes, you should be backing it up offline so that you can take your data and leave any time you want. This literally takes only 3 minutes to setup if you already use Thunderbird.
I just liked and commented and nothing happened. I even left the 'post on G+' checkbox enabled and it still doesn't show up on my G+ profile. I've setup youtube to use a pseudonym, btw.
Errm. How do you get everyone to start using a different email address in 3 minutes?
This has been their brilliant (and awful - I don't use gmail, and _hate_ this) move - to get people to use an address@gmail.com, so there is no way you can ever take it anywhere else (because even if you want to forward, you have to keep the account active).
The three minutes was for how long it takes to setup Thunderbird to backup your Gmail.
I'm very happy with Gmail and it's way better than all the other e-mail services that various entities force me to use, but the point I was making is that I could move out of Gmail with all my data if I wanted to.
> so there is no way you can ever take it anywhere else
The standard solution is to setup a google apps on your domain.
Google just did not get the point up to this date. They want to press us into their ad-network, but the way they do is just annoying. I am also planning now to drop my Google account, because it just does get to much. Every time, I have to log in, I am asked about telephone number or to "add some little extra information" -- I nearly got trapped recently. Just at the second look, I saw it was not "just some extra information" but they wanted me to sign up for G+. I will not and I will never. Because privacy is more worth than some candy they will give to you in return.
Facebook and Google don't care about your privacy, but you should, if you don't want to be abused in the new world of lost paradise.
She makes some great points, and I agree completely.
But in a sense, by making the great points, we who enjoy some small degree of privacy and anonymity on-line have already given up too much ground. We shouldn't have to make Very Serious Points about sexual harassment or hate crimes. As if a solution to those (quite real) problems would then make on-line anonymity moot.
The fact is, I like being pseudonymous on the web, and as it's not a situation I've been abusing, that is reason enough to allow it to continue to be possible. That's just the way a free society rolls. Freedom of choice is (supposedly) one of the core values of the nation that spawned Google in the first place.
nothing about this situation is causing anonymity to cease to be possible on the internet. It just makes it more difficult on a single video-sharing site, one run by a single for-profit company.
Freedom of choice has never before been more relevant. You as an individual in a free web (which Google advocates for strongly) have the choice to move to any number of other platforms if you prefer anonymity while sharing/viewing videos online. If enough people believe in anonymity, traffic and users will migrate to another site, and Google/YT will become less relevant and/or be forced to policy backtrack.
Whether you are for or against the new commenting policy, we should all try not to exaggerate what it means for society at large.
It was about two years ago I closed my G+ account because of that https://jeena.net/gplus and I just had a look at my G+ account (which I closed) and there are posts that I have been using hangouts and some YouTube comment too. So I assume it is not possible to really close a G+ account.
At this point, everyone really needs to decide whether all of their usage of Google services will be linked to their real-life identity, or none whatsoever (and migrate all usage of Google services linked to their real-life identity elsewhere)
Maintaining multiple distinct identities through various Google services is only going to become harder, and with shit like this I wouldn't trust even completely separate Google logins to maintain distinct identities in the future.
At this point, everyone really needs to decide whether all of their usage of Google services will be linked to their real-life identity, or none whatsoever
For a while I've lived under the illusion that if you sign out, log out from Google, you will be less prone to tracking. That was until I had to fool around with multiple Google accounts for some testing.
When I click "sign out" do you know what the default landing screen is? "Sign in"!
And do you know what that screen shows you? Every single google account you've ever logged into. They know who you are. Every single identity you've created.
So yeah. Logging out or using multiple accounts is no protection. They're still tracking you.
It's like brigade says here: Unless you're all out, you're 100% in as far as Google is concerned.
I _think_ this has happened because I have seen comments on Youtube with real name (or at least appearing to be real names) that I can't believe someone would leave with their real names attached to it. But still speculation on my part
It could just be that they did leave the comment on purpose, though. Most online newspapers in my country have switched to a full-name policy over the last year, and you wouldn't believe the things people manage to spew out even when their full name and photo are attached to the post.
I am increasingly convinced that full-name discussion => fewer moronic comments is a fallacy. Or at the very least a vastly overestimated correlation.
Whenever people advocate such a thing, I ask them for evidence it works, rather than just being something that sounds good. I have yet to receive any whatsoever.
Instead of merging with your G+ account you can link it to a G+ page (and use your YT username or other pseudonym as its name). This is part of the "link your account" flow. I think this would fix her problem.
I have since linked it to a dead-end G+ page. However, I wasn't given the option to do so initially -- I was confronted with my name and photo appearing on a comment that I'd been leaving under my YT identity (which is deliberately blank, doesn't identify gender, etc.)
The fact that it's possible to get around this idiotic move doesn't mean that it should have been made in the first place.
Thank you for the suggestion -- it certainly would have worked out much better if that had been the procedure that I was initially presented with, rather than clicking a number of times to refuse the link (on multiple occasions, spanning weeks), and then having the link forced without my permission, and with no opt-out option visible.
So the new and improved system is that you can have your youtube account linked up to a G+ thingie you never asked for and have no intention of using, instead of linking up to the G+ account you never asked for and have no intention using, but which is connected to your real name.
Yeah. I can see how that is an incremental improvement, but it still has a long way to go over what all users are asking: Do nothing. No linkage. Leave our accounts alone.
I think it's time -- Google or elsewhere -- to realize that anytime you post anything on the Internet, it can and will be used against you by anyone who dislikes you.
So the strategy is to not make enemies or to not post things that you can imagine, even in the slightest, being used against you. Not sure which is easier...
Of course, it's not all or nothing. You should take the minor inconvenience of using multiple browsers, one for your public name and the one in which you want to, for some reason, gain a following through participation, a la one of the Wiggin kids
Google is simply doing the noble thing. It is fucking-up so that it can pave the way for a better company to dominate. For a while. This is the way of Silicon Valley. Amirite Vic G.?
I feel like some people who claim they want privacy really don't value their privacy, but instead value something else (I hypothesize that it's just control) that seems like privacy.
You can find this poster's name by using Google Image search to link to her Flickr then from there she has her domain registered with her full name and address. (this pattern is pretty common, by that, I mean, given some identifying information, you can find a lot more. Anonymity is only effective if you practice consistent inconsistency.) A pseudonym here, a handle there, these are all things that establish permanence and link together to make an identifiable entity.
Putting your real name into YouTube isn't the problem here. This doesn't mean there isn't a problem, but it's not quite the problem being stated here.
Thanks for pointing out that security vulnerability -- blessedly, I didn't use current legal name/address info for the website (I do my best to be cagey about that stuff online -- that's similar to, but not identical to, my actual name), but I'll have to look into obscuring the WHOIS information further. Pisses me off to have to pay for privacy, when that information shouldn't be public for private individuals who own a domain.
And, yes, I really do value my privacy -- but, since my own knowledge of trackback information is limited (and Google Image Search is much more recent than the creation of my personal site), it's less that I don't value my privacy, and more that I failed to foresee that using the same profile photo (not even name/nym) on more than one site would create a security vulnerability.
I appreciate the heads-up, but, again, this only emphasizes the issues of Google (and the issue of requiring personal information to be visible on WHOIS to anyone other than government agencies) encroaching on personal privacy and the ability to compartmentalize profiles between different services.
I'm a different person on G+, Flickr, FB, LJ, etc. -- I tailor my posts to the interest groups that I share in various locations (and my perception of my own privacy -- I realize that a subpoena would break the security of a friends-locked post on LJ, but it's at least a relatively private space to share more personal information, whereas my profile on G+ has been more deliberately forward-facing, because I was interested in engaging with people outside my existing trust circle.
Putting my real name into YouTube actually was the problem that sparked my original post -- but it's symptomatic of a larger issue, the deliberate contraction of the ability to create persistent pseudonyms and personae that are consistent within the bounds of a single social network, but aren't necessarily easily trackable/connectible by a random stranger.
(I will say -- finding this out did decrease my sense of safety, since it's obvious that my intent to compartmentalize by using different persistent nyms, and building reputation under each nym, which can vary based on platform, was insufficient to protect a casual observer from landing on what COULD have been my actual name and address, had I not deliberately decided to risk the loss of my domain by putting in information that was designed to trap spammers -- i.e., if I got something addressed to that specific name, I knew that it was coming from someone who had looked up the WHOIS info.)
BTW, nothing like a casual doxxing on a public forum to make my point about the need for real privacy controls, and how unsafe lack of anonymity/effective pseudonymity on the web can make women, in particular, feel.
Congratulations, I've changed my G+ photo for the first time since I created the account.
Until now, I never felt uncomfortable having a photo of myself there, even though it meant that I had to deal with some small amount of unwelcome comments, and plenty of not-unwelcome flirty comments (which I'm fine with, I'm a flirty person, and I enjoy good banter. I'm not interested in anything more than that, and crude come-ons got deleted immediately, but I didn't mind the occasional complimentary exchange. If I'd had a problem with it, I would have used a different photo, or an image that didn't show my face.)
Google Image Search didn't exist at the time that I created my site, and my Flickr account also predated it.
You say that "anonymity is only effective if you practice consistent inconsistency" -- but if your goal is a persistent pseudonym which allows for ongoing human interaction over years, you're almost inevitably going to let some type of identifying information slip.
Your comment sounds suspiciously like victim-blaming in this case -- I never claimed to be an incredibly tech-savvy privacy specialist, I'm an an ordinary user of multiple online services and social platforms, and while my attempts to create walls between some of those identities may have been inadequate, they should have been respected.
I present as the same persistent pseudonym in most places, so it's fairly easy to track me through that method -- but that was deliberate, so that people could recognize my username cross-platform.
Since G+ was the one platform where I was doing a lot of public engagement with strangers, I chose a different nym, and deliberately didn't connect those identities. And, again, Google's products broke down those walls -- in this case, inspired by your actions rather than an automated merge, but still a privacy violation powered by Google.
No, putting a user's real name into YouTube isn't the whole of the problem. But it's a symptom of the contraction of identity that Google's products are forcing, even if users have actually taken active steps (and many people have taken more steps than I have, including creating multiple Gmail accounts under different identities) to try to protect their identity privacy and to keep their various online identities from merging.
Maybe Google is trying to do us a favor, and spare us the illusion of anonymity when true anonymity is dead. That's my most charitable interpretation. Less charitably, they simply don't care how their policies happen to burn x% of their user base: "we'll you probably shouldn't be active online if you can't deal with a few stalkers."
One of the great features of the internet is the fact that you can remain anonymous under a username if you want to. I, personally, have never chosen to use a username that is not identifiable with me--but I realize there are people out there that want to (or need to) remain anonymous, especially if they post content (comments or even other content).
That's one of the great features of the internet itself, and honestly it's a shame that certain companies like Google wants to force using our real names on everyone.
It does make sense, though, that if a company such as Google owns multiple services or sites, they would want users to use the same accounts across multiple platforms. However, I don't see why you can't use different usernames or personas across multiple services: just log in using one account, but use several different public usernames (if you want to do that) across different sites.
Why would anyone harass someone who's eating bacon in their profile picture? On the other hand, I think she nailed the description of the typical (90%) YT commenter.
Assuming your question was serious: Because she displays a very minor amount of cleavage in the picture, with a pleasant smile.
In other words, her picture is fun and completely unobjectionable.
Unfortunately, if that picture is shown outside of her private context it's also liable to generate hordes of crude come-ons from lonely men who see it while browsing Youtube. This is different from a facebook profile picture because she can't comment without showing it.
If you know any women who use OK Cupid, ask them how many creepy messages they have to filter through. Or if you truly want to be horrified, make a personals ad on Craigslist pretending to be a woman. You will get pictures of penises.
"Or if you truly want to be horrified, make an ad on Craigslist pretending to be a woman. You will get pictures of penises."
This might initially seem like a silly question, but as someone who wants to understand the perspectives of both sexes I wonder: Why can this behaviour generally be observed only in male to female exchanges but not the reverse?
I am sure you were joking, but to clarify and expand: Why do men seek contact with the opposite sex more frequently than women? Why do they tend to do so in a way that seems to bother the woman in question? Why are women not doing the same to men?
...seriously? well, because women and men experience life very differently. being a woman is a lot more dangerous - you are simply too weak to defend yourself against most guys. so, you have to trust that they will treat you fairly before sleeping with them or starting a relationship, and if you're wrong, the consequences are terrible. men simply don't have to worry about consequences this severe - as a guy picking up girls, you never have to wonder if they will rape or abuse you.
remember that rape is still exceedingly common (1 in 3 women in the USA will be sexually abused at some point). women are just as sexual as guys, it's just much more dangerous (and socially unacceptable - slut-shaming, etc) for them to solicit sex. as for why anonymous dudes on the internet are so creepy, it's most likely a combination of the disinhibition anonymity gives you and the sexual deviance a boner gives you.
Because they don't need to, in general; and because reproductive biology predisposes women to be choosy (as the physical burden of pregnancy and childbirth on women is enormously high).
Once one person realizes it's a successful strategy to send more messages then their competition, their competition also has to send more messages. Arms race quickly ensues. And once you have such an arms race on one side, the other gender no longer has to even bother initiating conversations.
Why did the arms race tip towards men competing and women getting it easy? Probably cultural norms. But once the arms race got started, there was no putting it back in the bag.
That's an intellectually lazy excuse: humans are social creatures – completely ignoring that (and the existence of birth-control) to rely on biological determinism ignores most of the things which make us human.
(Put another way: your explanation would cover our closest relatives: chimps, gorillas, orangutans and bonobos – given the huge differences in behavior, a simple reproductive cost model is obviously incomplete)
I think the three other responses you had received to this comment when I post this give a more general answer: No one knows, and most fall back on evolutionary psychology to come up with a plausible-sounding explanation.
I understand her discomfort with harassers, but it seems to me that it's a trade between crude come-ons from people with real names attached and murder/rape threats from people without their real names attached.
I prefer a web where pseudonyms are allowed, but if anything, real names could reduce harassment.
What Amagumori said -- I can block/delete harassing comments (and do, on a regular basis), but I am far more concerned with murder/rape threats from people who know where I live.
I'm a big girl, I can deal with crude come-ons appropriately (which is to say, snort/fume depending on the content, then report, block, and delete.)
What concerns me is the unwanted linking of trackable personal information, through a service that had been repeatedly declined by the user in question.
I'm thankful that I am not in compliance with Google's "real-name" policy, or else I'd potentially have harassers showing up at my door -- and that's a shitty, uncomfortable, violated feeling to be experiencing, because Google broke my trust after I told them that I didn't want to share that information, and they shared it anyway, without giving me a chance to opt out.
In this case, no actual harm was done. However, it illustrates the potential for harm very clearly -- when you require "real names" (and, in some cases, enforce that with requests for drivers-license scans, etc., as has happened a number of times since the G+ nymwars started), you must respect your users' privacy choices about how they want those names to be shared with the public.
All it takes is one stalker, one violent ex, one deranged family member, and their real-name policy, combined with the collapse of walls that users set up for self-protection, is a recipe for preventable tragedy.
the issue is not the visibility of the harasser's names but hers. using your real name gives people the ability to find your phone number and address fairly easily.
I can't edit my reply, but another comment downstream put it even better than I did:
"Her profile picture is a woman coyly putting something vaguely phallic in her mouth. If it was posted to reddit the slobbering masses would be tripping over themselves to tip their fedoras in her general direction, so imagine what it would be like on YouTube."
Again, a fun, funny photo, in context. In the wilds of Youtube, that will get her plenty of awful comments and come-ons.
Her profile picture is a woman coyly putting something vaguely phallic in her mouth. If it was posted to reddit the slobbering masses would be tripping over themselves to tip their fedoras in her general direction, so imagine what it would be like on YouTube.
That's fine so long as you trust Google to abide by their word on how they do or don't link or structure their services.
The point of the G+ article referenced by the OP that I wrote, is that I had repeatedly responded "no" to the option of linking my (pseudonymous) YouTube account with my (pseudonymous) G+ account, strictly on the merits that I'd used the same (pseudonymous) Gmail account to originally register for both.
At the time I'd set each of these services up, they were a freestanding service. I'd created a Gmail account some years back recognizing that having a pseudonymous identity would be useful to me. I later created a YouTube account to be able to access the occasional restricted video. I've occasionally commented on and/or rated videos, but as those actions became increasingly public and accessible, I've periodically purged my content there under that account. And when G+ started up, having first created an account under my real name, I rapidly decided that I didn't want an "identity service", deleted that G+ profile (elements of it remain but I make very little use of them) and switched to a pseudonymous account as my primary persona on that service.
Now Google have, against my wishes, elected to merge the previously independent G+ and YouTube accounts. And for the life of me I can't figure out how to un-do that, or to disable the YouTube account entirely.
I also no longer trust Google to keep separate aspects of my online existence separate.
That still seems like a very awkward migration path. I'm not sympathetic to the trolls on YT, but some people need a "stuff i will leave behind" model where they don't end up outing themselves.
I am very positive this would be the perfect moment to start a kickstarer funded youtube clone! Yea, glad I inspired your next big project, thank me later! (But please don't forget to... I know you won't if you are a good hacker. I am not in the position to dedicate any time/resources to this project. Please ask me for some contact info when you are sure you will be diving into this. Please do it, and... good luck!)
A comment I left a few weekends ago, which addressed the same topic but before the Youtube/G+ story broke: [0]
"Hijacking the top comment to talk about a big concern I have. This EFF article argues that there's a place for Anonymity on the Internet [1], and I think most of us agree (especially if we emphathize with those in Iran, China, Syria, and the like).
But what HNers must realize is the following: The mainstream Internet can not become the Tor-visited Dark-Net (which restores anonymity) that many believe is inevitable WITHOUT losing its positive sociological impact. Sites like Reddit, Twitter, even HN rely on anonymity and also provide a great deal of such value. Here's a simple example of 'sociological impact': CNN (FoxNews, etc) pays attention to what the top links on Reddit are, because the site is in the public's face -- and: the people have a collective voice.
Next: Without the perception of anonymity, sites like Reddit will stop flourishing.
Let's go deeper: Reddit's culture thrives on "anonymity" in the form of throwaway accounts and people being themselves without representing themselves. Throwaway accounts (heard of 'Cation Bot' or 'AWildSketchAppeared'?) are a form of expression unique to environments which allow for anonymity (pseudonyms). Who's to say novelty accounts would be as risque or hilarious without anonymity? Certainly these sites flourish because users feel comfortable playing a part and taking a chance.
There are two issues at play which threaten anonymity on Reddit. Now obvious (in light of Snowden's leaks): 1.) Reddit usernames can, and probably are, being mapped to peoples' actual identity. ... Not as obvious: 2.) Users' up and down votes, even private messages, can also be sniffed with ease.
Reddit's' devteam has retreated from the idea of providing HTTPS for its voting/web API [2], so people's actions (aside from comments) can be mapped as well. I tried to raise awareness of this issue five months ago [3]. I know there's an argument to be made that SSL/HTTPS is useless anyway (just use Tor!, they say), but the bigger question remains:
Can a mainstream community such as Reddit exist in tomorrow's Internet? I'd say that such web-societies are fragile -- likely targets of dragnet surveillance and subversion, especially given their disruptive nature.
People and the press are paranoid about Facebook/Google privacy because its users (are encouraged to) identify themselves explicitly, but the reality is no different with sites like Reddit - just the perception. Just think about how much more is shared on a site like Reddit by its members because of their pseudonyms! Few people aside from the avid Tor-using//r/netsec crowd have realized this.
Reddit is the internet "as we know it," and I feel the Internet is about to change.
In hindsight - Google's initial "no pseudonyms" policy for Google+ was prescient -- though the company eventually capitulated to popular demand for them. [4] Perhaps they wished to save each of us the unsavory realization that aliases exist in name-only (pun intended). :/"
Fucking frustrating that everyday pseudo anonymity gets wrapped up with NSA style information slurping.
If your threat is "The NSA can de-anonymise my online accounts" then you're fucked and very little you can do will protect you.
If your threat is "Some 14 year old fuckwit on YouTube can de-anonymise my online accounts" then it makes a lot of sense to ask Google to stop being such cunts with Google+
Please for the love of christ stop dragging well funded government agencies into every single discussion of online privacy. It's fucking idiotic.
> for the love of christ stop dragging well funded government agencies into every single discussion of online privacy. It's fucking idiotic.
There could well be serious consequences should we fail to fully address the attacks on privacy, freedom, and democracy by our own political/military establishment(s).
It will be interesting to see just how ''fucking idiotic'' the well funded gvt agencies become now that they are being challenged head-on.
How many terrorists™ are among us? How many terrorists™ walk in the high ranks of the international political/financial system?
It’s interesting that you would hold up reddit as an example of the “positive sociological impact” of anonymity on the internet, when OP specifically describes her desire to avoid “sexist, racist, homophobic, sophomoric, monosyllabic jerks”—precisely the sort of creature that reddit breeds. Though to be fair, the anonymity may not be to blame for reddit’s culture, seeing as other internet forums with similar traditions of anonymity have managed to avoid attracting such unpleasant crowds.
You are vastly overgeneralizing. Have you ever digged into the heavily moderated subreddits? The front page is not particularly representative of the positive parts of anonymity that spenvo is talking about. I am a very active reddit user and respectfully, you have no clue what you are talking about.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that reddit as a whole is representative of the younger (<30) parts of American society, not just a particular demographic or political group. Reddit has > 50 million users and is a very heterogenuous community. It is not just some hangout exclusive to nerds any longer. So you will see every political opinion and every positive and negative personal characteristic. As usual, the front page will show the lowest common denominator. There is by definition no way this could be any different, which you can see even if you look at the comments under any national newspaper article.
I don’t want to derail this topic any further, but I’m quite familiar with reddit, and I would disagree that “reddit as a whole” is very heterogeneous or representative of the vast diversity of younger Americans. At a minimum, reddit’s mainstream is dominated by people belonging to a certain archetype—under 30, perhaps, but certainly also white and male and textbook brogressive[0]—resulting in thoroughly predictable patterns of discussion and voting.
The problem with smaller subreddits is that even with heavy moderation, they tend to be dominated by the mainstream of the site. For example (at least as of a couple years ago, when I largely quit participating) every new feminist- or woman-friendly subreddit would immediately be invaded by “men’s rights” activists to the point of rendering it useless for discussion. The only subreddit I’m aware of today where this hasn’t happened is /r/shitredditsays, but I suspect you’d agree that SRS’s utility for meaningful discussion is… limited.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. I'm aware of the subreddit drama you are referencing, but it didn't make a big splash in the communities I frequent - apart from mentioned SRS derailing a couple of legitimate discussions that in no way deserved to be characterized as misognystic.
But on reddit you can create an account called "fred_jones" or "slwkajbgj" instead of "Eleanora Rashid-Feldman" and avoid having that behaviour directed at you like a heat-seeking missile. GP is arguing that the douchebags only become a significant problem if your diversity[1] status is tagged to your profile.
[1] Women are the majority, so "minority status" => "diversity status"
@SnydenBitchy - Given the context, Reddit seems off-putting as an example. The comment I reposted was not in direct response to the OP.
Tehwalrus makes an excellent observation. The role that anonymity played for OP on YT would serve her well on other communities like Reddit.
Specifically to your remark on the questionable 'positive impact' of Reddit: I would argue that it has done a great deal to heighten the visibility of the Free and Open Internet/NSA stories and cases of corruption or injustice. There's a lot of insensitive humor, but I'm not going to say my (or anyone's) opinion of that matters, as long as no one is hurt or put in an inescapable position.
The bigger point remains: Which web-communities depend on anonymity? As OP's story highlighted, clearly she (and presumably others), as a Youtube user - depend(ed) on anonymity.
Well, this is a bit tangential, but I wonder if it’s true that reddit’s intolerant culture (extending far beyond “insensitive humor”) really doesn’t matter. A community like reddit, I think, would be so much more useful as a resource for activism and knowledge-sharing if only the culture of its mainstream were inclusive rather than hostile towards marginalized voices, including women and minorities.
For example, the issues you mention of open internet, NSA spying, etc. affect everyone, not just the redditor in-crowd, and presumably would be of interest to a wider audience. And there are plenty more cases of injustice that don’t stand a chance of exciting passion among the redditor demographic—I’m thinking feminism or issues of racial justice (to name another example from recent memory, the voting majority of redditors are convinced George Zimmerman is a hero).
I don’t know how different reddit’s culture would be without the anonymity, but I agree it’s an interesting question.
> Women are the majority, so "minority status" => "diversity status"
Surely, by that reasoning "diversity status" is just as inappropriate a term? If a group is over 50% female, adding one more female will make it less diverse.
"diversity streams" is the term I prefer, since it's about under-representation in specific spheres of activity (which should be more diverse).
This context, internet anonymity, is rather an odd case - we're discussing the advantages of hiding in the crowd, by masking your identity as a member of a stream. I'm still using my preferred language for similar political problems involving the diversity streams, because I think it's the most appropriate nomenclature.
Well, I've never been sympathetic to the language and politics of "diversity", but I think it's especially, gratuitously inapt here. I suspect very strongly that women and men are present on youtube in comparable numbers. Youtube has mass awareness.
The problem discussed here has nothing to do with representation in specific spheres of activity; it's driven by specifically being female in the presence of men. Women walking by men on the street get catcalled, even though walking on the street is open to, and participated in by, all. The female commenters you mention are not trying to hide their "diversity" status, they're trying to hide their female status.
This is why I use the term "marginalized groups" rather than "minority". Black people were a majority in apartheid South Africa. But they were marginalized.
Rather than a relational "social group", as the term would indicate, the term refers to a category that is differentiated and defined by the social majority, that is, those who hold the majority of positions of social power in a society. The differentiation can be based on one or more observable human characteristics, including, for example, ethnicity, race, gender, wealth, health or sexual orientation. Usage of the term is applied to various situations and civilizations within history, despite its popular mis-association with a numerical, statistical minority.
Blacks were still the minority in apartheid South Africa, just not the statistical minority.
But in spaces like there, where people are unlikely to know things like that, it can be helpful to use terms like "margalized group" or "oppressed group", in order to stop a pedantic geek ( :) ) getting into a dictionary definition argument.
the context I'm most familiar with is representation (in a profession, in parliament, etc) so we talk positively about making those places more diverse, rather than pointing out the systemic marginalisation (which, for the case of sexism/etc in those contexts, is often subconscious - unlike apartheid.)
The quality that breeds such jerks is simply comfort. When people are comfortable, they make bad jokes, express unpopular opinions, reference subcultures and so on. Whether comfort is a positive thing, sociologically, has occasionally been debated, but only in comfortable settings.
It's interesting when you hold up the type of creature reddit breeds when OP was linking to a re-share of a post originally made by a pseudonymous Google+ user. Namely me.
At my request, I might add, due to some idiosyncrasies of G+: a re-share of a post preserves the content of a post even if the original is deleted. But a re-share and the comments on it is not itself re-sharable. A link to a G+ post, however, is.
So, should I delete or purge my G+ account (I haven't yet decided which, if either, I plan on doing), Andi's posts will continue to exist with the content on them visible.
What I am not getting here is this. I get why people may want to be anonymous. Google says - no can do, you can not be anonymous with us. We insist on identifying you. Why keep using Google services and complain instead of using some other service more respectful of one's privacy? It's not like one cannot live without commenting on youtube videos.
>>Google says - no can do, you can not be anonymous with us.
Where does Google say that? Is it as direct as you put it, or is it to be inferred from a constantly changing variety of experiences with Google services and settings?
It says it by their actions which are not conductive to one's anonymity - real name policy, etc. It is clear that they goal is for users to have their real-life identity to be linked to their Google identity. Which may be not what the user desires - but that just means the product Google is selling is not for this user.
Public and/or anonymous data should be posted to a single global, anonymous, distributed storage system [1]. All other data should be stored on your personal system with 700 permissions, and require explicit pull requests from your system parties interested in using it.
This setup could offer a public, searchable medium that is safe for anonymous discourse, and includes plausible deniability, as well as a protected personal space with fine-grained access control. A brightnet/darknet system.
This is fascinating: is the internet not as male as we all thought? Is the default assumption that it's male and women have wrapped themselves in the safety of the net's ultimate default setting?
So far as I'm aware, at least since the early 2000s or so, women have contributed the majority of user-created content on the internet. They just don't visibly do it in the few relatively small echo-chamber places HN readers are likely to frequent, so HN readers end up assuming that the internet looks like what they see on HN.
Am I the only one who finds it ironic that she's posting her criticisms from Google+? I'm not trying to be snarky or funny. Does she genuinely value her Google+ blog or associations or whatever more than the privacy she's so concerned about?
She can, in fact, delete Google+ and keep Gmail. Try it. I have!
Since Google supposedly runs on data, the only way Google is going to figure out their problems is if people delete Google+ or stop using it. Otherwise there's no such thing as bad publicity, especially if you're an advertising company.
G+ was my public-facing platform, the place where I engaged with people who I didn't know (most of my posts are public there.) It's separate from my normal online identity, deliberately (the people who read my friendslocked posts in my own space know about my G+ nym and profile, but I chose not to connect it to my normal nym and other personal information.)
I've found it to be an interesting, valuable, informative way to keep up with news, to meet people whose social spheres I wouldn't have otherwise encountered, and to have thoughtful, ongoing conversations. It's a space where I'm engaged in political, social, and specific-group-related commentary (gender and sexual minorities, disability-related discussions.)
I knew that, by using G+ publicly, I was giving up a carefully-considered amount of privacy -- but that was associated with a single nym, not my larger online identity.
Does Google know who I am? Yeah, sure. What I didn't want was Joe Public (or, worse, Joe YouTube) being able to track me cross-platform, which is why I never associated it with my normal persistent pseudonym or my other spheres of online activity.
I'm criticizing G+ from G+, because I'd love to see some changes made by Google. That's the best way I have of reaching an audience that includes Google employees, and it's also the platform where I've had the most frequent discussions of online privacy, etc.
Sure, I could try to go in and delete everything I've ever posted, now that Google has pulled its latest anti-privacy move. What, exactly, would that accomplish? It's still cached, and as various people will tell you, it's difficult to fully delete a G+ profile, unless you'd like to give up using all Google services (and I have yet to find a mail provider who gives me similar utility for free, or for a low price.)
I didn't mind the targeted ads in Gmail, they were the price I paid for using the service. What I do mind is the forced merging and integration of activities and nyms which users had repeatedly requested not be merged (I declined to merge my YT account repeatedly.)
Since I wasn't an active YT user, and I was able to re-link my YT profile to a dead-end G+ page after the fact, I have not been directly harmed.
But if I'd been someone who was an active YT content provider on a controversial subject, for example, or if I'd been outed in some way by the merge, or if I'd actually FOLLOWED Google's real-name policy and used my full legal name as they had wanted, there was certainly the potential for substantial harm to be done -- because that allows people to follow me (and other users) home -- both virtually and physically.
Google's convenience for data-marketing shouldn't outweigh personal safety or privacy concerns. I'm less distressed by their having the information available than I am with them sharing it with the public, after repeatedly declining their "offer" and not being given the option to opt-out.
The existence of a work-around (a dead-end "page") does not mean that the action was an acceptable one to take in the first place -- and it took a savvy user advising me of the work-around to cause me to look up how to do it . . . there wasn't an option for me to do so at the time they merged my accounts, which would have solved a lot of the related privacy concerns.
I think it's kind of offensive to refer to a product decision by a website as Anschluss; both because it implies Google's leadership are the Nazis, and because it trivializes the actual German/Austrian union (and thus beginning of WW2).
Marginally more offensive than the "co-prosperity sphere" thing pinboardguy did.
To be clear, that wasn't my term (it was the title of a link that I reposted), but I agree with you -- I'd have personally chosen something with less of the weight of history and atrocity behind it.
Yeah, Godwination isn't stylish. The analogy is inaccurate too. But that's what the pissed-off people are calling it, and that was the title of the post.
Alternatively, why not think of it this way: If you disagree with what's being done on YouTube, delete your account and move on. Nobody's forcing anyone to comment or maintain a Google account. If you're going to be there, you play by their rules. What's the point in bitching about Google's changes in policy when Google isn't forcing you to use their product and when you can leave when you want to.
A lot of the problem is reneging on previous privacy/data segregation policies. That is an entirely legitimate complaint.
There's also the question of to what extent you can opt out in the modern world. Got a mobile phone, pretty much essential to work or life these days? Your life is now beholden to Google or Apple. So "lol just stop using it" is fatuous.
Alternatively, why not think of it this way: If you disagree with what this person said in their post, ignore it and move on. Nobody's forcing anyone to read an opinion or complaint they disagree with. If you read it, you'll be reading that person's opinion, not your own. What's the point in bitching about someone's post when they aren't forcing you to read their complaint and when you can leave when you want to?
Maybe you're blocking apis.google.com or plus.googleapis.com?
Even more unrelated: NoScript users who allow apis.google.com might want to add an Adblock Plus 'Ad Blocking Rule' ||apis.google.com/js/plusone.js to prevent spying via G+ buttons.
You cant. That's the problem. You automatically get that profile by having a gmail account. They're trying to force you to use that profile for YouTube as well. Google has these incredibly valuable products and that work great separately but they're trying to mash everything together.
A bit of a bait-and-switch in that respect as well. I probably wouldn't have signed up for Gmail if I were making the choice today. But years ago, it was just an ad-supported email service, and seemed like a pretty reasonable choice. It was better than Yahoo Mail or Hotmail. When I signed up for it, there was absolutely no indication that it was a social network or going to become one, and in fact their rhetoric around it strongly suggested that it would not be (there was a lot of reassurance about how the only use of your data would be for the automated ad-targeting).
And as a webmail service, it's still pretty good. But I'm uncomfortable by all this stuff I've now been involuntarily opted-in to as a result of opening a Gmail account. And as these things go, having accumulated several years of use of it, it's now going to be some hassle to move away from it.
I wish that were true. I have never enabled Google plus, yet there is a profile page out there for me. So when I got to plus.google.com I get the "Set up your account!" page but there is a link for me at https://profiles.google.com/[long number string] that has my full name and gender on it and I can't find any way to delete that profile.
However, there are significant safety issues associated with requiring people to use their legal names for online discussions, and I think that it will seriously muzzle political dissent, social movements which don't currently enjoy mainstream support, gender and sexual minority group discussions, the creation of "safe spaces" (which, I realize, are something of an illusion, but still have value), and vigorous intellectual discourse.
I certainly wouldn't have been comfortable being as politically and socially outspoken as I am on G+ (a deliberately public-facing persona with a unique nym for that purpose), if I had been forced to use my full legal name for the purpose.
Given some of the hate and harassment that has been directed my way (and, honestly, I've gotten off light compared to many), I absolutely would not feel safe engaging in some of those discussions if my name, phone number, and location were easily accessible.
I know that it's difficult to completely compartmentalize between nyms and platform identities, but I think that the ability to choose which face is forward, appropriate to the social group that you're engaging with, is an important part of the human experience.
If you don't want your boss and your grandmother reading your opinions on politics, social issues, sexuality, etc., then a pseudonym is the obvious answer -- and I've seen any number of sites (LiveJournal is a particular favorite) implement granular controls on privacy, in order to establish nym identity and reputation, while still allowing users to speak to their chosen audience.
Can you ever be truly private? Probably not. But it's important to be able to have some form of shield from the casual observer, to have a name and identity that you choose, rather than having one chosen for you, which may reveal far more than you intended.
Yes, I post publicly on G+, and sacrifice some level of privacy in doing so -- I do it because I enjoy the level of discourse on that site, and talking with interesting strangers is part of the fun. On the other hand, I deliberately didn't link that profile with any of my other online identities . . . and, while I may not have done a perfect job of it, I at least did my best to create walls between those personae.
As Dredmorbius said, it's important that users be able to maintain those walls if they choose, without a service provider choosing to collapse them and merge those identities without permission. By using their services, I did not consent to that action (in fact, repeatedly refused their attempts to do so), and if given a choice between leaving the Google-services hive and having my legal identity attached to everything I've ever written, I'd leave.
What is deceptive and duplicitous about this latest G+/YouTube action, is that many users who expressly refused the "offer" to merge accounts were merged without permission, and often those merges revealed personal information that the users had not chosen to share with YouTube.
I find that intensely disturbing, and I am seriously hoping that some type of action is taken against Google, as with Buzz, regarding the breach of private user information.
OP's G+ post was a link to a reshare of mine (a story in itself).
I've just made a far-too-long reply to the "Dear Googles: Stop asking" story also trending on HN (how'd I get so lucky? No idea, but thanks). I'll try keeping things shorter here, though recommend reading this as well:
First: this is fundamentally about respect and trust. Google respecting user's stated preferences regarding disclosure, and users trusting that Google will do so. I argue at length above that the first is absent and the second has been destroyed. This is quite bad for Google's reputation in the long run, especially as a cloud services company.
I'm finding this ... exceptionally confounding given Google's apparent strident opposition to NSA and other surveillance (a position of Google's I unreservedly applaud). As I've argued before, Google with their ever-expanding and increasingly aggressive personal information aggregation efforts are carrying the NSA's water. Personal information can be an asset, but it's also a tremendous liability when misused or mismanaged.
The fact that I've participated in multiple forums (including G+, Hacker News, Reddit, StackExchange, and elsewhere) pseudonymously over the past several years should show that it's possible to carry on reasoned discussions as such. I'd rather intentionally set up this persona to give me both freedom and an at least partially credible reputation for some discussions. As an experiment it's worked pretty well.
What happened with the YouTube / G+ integration (Anschluss as I term it) above is that three Google services I'd independently registered: Gmail, YouTube, and G+, collapsed the walls between each. I'd set these up beginning in 2008 as I determined I'd want a long-term resident pseudonym and I gradually started extending it to additional services. When G+ was first beta'd, I'd initially signed up under my own name, but was quickly convinced by Eric Schmidt's "identity service" comments and NymWars that this was probably not the way I wanted to go, so I wiped that account and set up a pseudonymous one (against G+ TOU at the time). At some point I'd also configured a YouTube account, using the same Gmail account to register both. My views on video viewing (as with much else) are that it's a private activity and, even pseudonymously, I don't share my viewing actions with others unless I fully consciously intend to do so. Some of us with longer memories recall Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and the snooping of his video rental habits, as well as librarians who resisted FBI attempts to turn up patron's library records.
So I had and intended to retain a wall between the two accounts.
And Google knocked it down.
So I posted about it. And I'm trying to figure out what to do with my G+ account, so when Andi re-shared my post and found that other's couldn't re-share her (excellent) content, I recommended she keep the re-share (as that will preserve my own content should I purge it or leave G+), and create a new post linking to her own re-share. That's ... one of many hoops G+ makes you jump through. All. The. Time.
Not only did Google demolish that wall, against my intent, but there's no clear way to undo that action. As I mentioned to Yonatan Zunger, this is no longer about UI/UX, workflows, tools, or technology, it's about trust. And Google have very clearly demonstrated that they cannot be trusted to maintain a confidence expressly stated as such.
Trust is a privilege I give once. Never twice.
In my case, the actual damage to my reputation and person is minimal: I don't exist. There is no Edward Morbius, he's a reference to a 1958 film character whose abbreviated username looks vaguely interesting. For someone such as Andi S, it's another story. For some people, this could be career, relationship, or life-ending. Google's inability to grasp just how wrong what they've done is ... is absolutely unconscionable. I really don't get it.
But even for the ordinary person with nothing to fear who'd tried to do what an Andi, or Edward Snowden, or Karen Silkwood, or Deep Throat, or Ai Weiwei, or countless others have done, but simply wishes to keep different aspects of their online activities separated would find their wishes disrespected.
And that's really low.
It's also not isolated. I won't re-cap my other HN comment here, other than to note that the lack of respect shown here seems endemic to G+ generally, and increasingly to Google as a company. Where it once provided useful tools which made my life easier and richer, it increasingly gets in my way and sets up traps. This isn't a good sign.
If Google won't allow that on their services anymore, I pray everyone leaves them & moves to services that understand this. The market giants think they can bully us into behaving the way they want us to rather than realizing that they are privileged by having our business. I would recommend giving business to alternative sites as much as possible to break internet monopolies that are setting the stage for these forceful policies.