Slashdot Mirror
Google Launches Identity Verification Badge Scheme
theodp writes "CNET reports that rather than backing down after complaints about its insistence that Google+ user accounts be opened under a real name, Google has upped the ante and will pin 'verification badges' on users in an effort to assure people that 'the person you're adding to a circle is really who they claim to be.' In a Friday night post, Google employee Wen-Ai Yu explained that the Google+ team is initially 'focused on verifying public figures, celebrities, and people who have been added to a large number of Circles, but we're working on expanding this to more folks.'"
If, at the same time, they limit or stop disabling accounts that don't use a real name. Having a verification badge as "proof of real name" while allowing the use of unverified, pseudonymous identities (without the badge) is a perfectly fine idea.
Of course, if they're going to keep up the nonsense of entirely forbidding pseudonymous accounts, this means nothing.
I know some thing for sure, I won't be signing up for google plus. You know damn well they aren't concerned with your privacy or protecting you, they just want to use the info you put on google plus to market to you. The more info, the better the marketing. never ever ever.
Mean what you say...say what you mean.
"whether or not we like it,"
That's just the thing. We DO like it. Well, I don't, maybe you don't either, but in the aggregate we the public LOVE giving up our privacy and anonymity. We do it voluntarily, in exchange for things we could have gotten without giving it up.
I've been on the internet a long time. Since the early 80's. I've watched people by the hundreds of millions chose the paths that allow for more monitoring, less privacy, and so forth, time after time after time.
We GAVE the authorities and the data mining private companies this control. I'm willing to PGP my mail to anyone. I don't use facebook, I block their "like" buttons, I block google's tracking crap, I encrypt my IM conversations with friends. But do other people? Generally no. The internet has turned into a place that allows a scale of monitoring and behavioral profiling that exceeds anything George Orwell could have imagined. It didn't have to be this way. It's this way because we don't care.
It's a fight I fought for many years, trying to convince people to value their privacy. I lost.
I'm getting to the point where I no longer like Google, nor it's products. Verify this, Google+ that, really now.
Agreed, but isn't this better than what they were doing?
Before they would ban everyone they thought was fake. Now it appears they'll let you be fake, but you get a extra "This is a REAL Person!" badge if they verify you.
This is a GOOD thing. So now you can have your fake and anonymous profiles for those that are worried what they say on the internet will get back to their job, and you can have your "real name" accounts for family and friends.
Really they should have been doing this since the beginning but better late than never, and this is the first feature they've added that has not been a direct copy from Facebook since Facebook still bans people that they think are fake even though they're real.
Good job Google+, I might switch to you yet.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Google's right to set the terms under which it provides its services is not in dispute, but the fact that Google has the right to do what it's doing doesn't mean its actions are therefore beyond legitimate criticism. In a world increasingly dominated by corporate interests, having corporations behave in a manner consistent with the ideals of a free society is far better than the alternative.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Do I remember the GNAA? Sure I do. I read slashdot at -1 at all times, simply because the moderation here is unbelievably wrongheaded. So I see every troll post. And they don't bother me one bit -- I would much rather see what an Anonymous Coward has to say than subject myself to Slashdot's rather pitiful offering of preemptively devaluing the anonymous remarks. Quite often, the anonymous remarks contain more valuable content than the "highly rated" remarks. Part of that is that moderation here is so badly broken, but part of it stems directly from the fact that as an anonymous speaker, people do indeed have wider latitude in what they can say. I'm not only interested in the things we're allowed, or supposed, to say. I want to hear what people think as they actually choose to express it in the most unfettered manner possible. GNAA? That stuff is utterly pitiful, and takes just about zero effort to recognize and skip over. An anonymous post containing material unsanctioned at the source from someone in Washington, from within congress (yeah, we have posts like that here), or Iraq, or Google, for that matter... now *that's* something I'm interested in reading. And those posts would not exist in the same form if they were signed by Real Name.
The thing about slashdot is that although the corporate culture leans strongly towards the muzzling of the anonymous, it does NOT enforce this -- it leaves that up to the individual user. So I see everyone. Others choose, that is CHOOSE, to stick with the results of moderation and the default low ranking of anonymous posts.
Google's corporate culture path here is, apparently, not going to allow the users any choice about how they manage their circles. It would be as simple as Slashdot's "browse at -1" option; "only let people into my particular circle(s) if they have the "real name" thing in their profile, and then allow individual lockouts on top of that. Control it at circle granularity, and it's workable. I could have circles that were unrepressed, and others could bask in the knowledge that so-and-so is using their "Real Name."
But Google, as you point out, isn't in this for the users. That whole "do no evil" thing? Utter nonsense. As these policies show, when it comes to a choice between money and not doing people harm, money wins. And that *is* a choice they can make. And we can just look at "do no evil" as just another marketing slogan. Which I guess is exactly what it is.
The one thing consumers -- which is what we are with relation to Google -- have as our little bit of leverage is that we can vote with our value to the company; That's why you won't find me on Google+ (or Facebook.) I've never opted into either one. I always found Facebook's TOS to be odious (yeah, I actually read site TOS declarations) and Google's whole "we must know who everyone is" simply makes me want to be somewhere else where I can interact with the people they leave out.
When you opt into this real name thing, you're leaving behind those who have been stalked, those who are political rebels or pariahs,
those who the state (or the feds) have declared outcasts, those on "lists", justifiably or not, people in countries where free speech is a free ticket to a machete party... me, I have no interest in this sanitized "we know who you are" world. That's a very bad, even immoral, choice for me. But I won't say you're bad because you want to go there. I'll just view it as a place containing the people I *don't* need to be listening to. The sheep. The ones who all say the same thing, think the same thing, and are happy to have the ostracized folks living under bridges -- and would just as soon forget they exist.
I lean strongly libertarian; I think Google should be able to do what they want. But when they do things I consider odious, then *I* get to do what I want, too, and that is to not engage the company in what I consider to be less than good practices. Google+ is odious, as I presently understand it. As long as that is the case, "teh social" is "teh worthless."
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Yeah...nice try with the Orwell hyperbole, but until we're voluntarily installing always-on public webcams in our homes and sending our parents to reeducation camps underneath the Department of Justice building I think we're a little short.
I know what you mean, but think about what they have instead. With the Orwell version, someone had to constantly monitor those screens and listen-in on people. Today, a computer program can scan conversations everywhere automatically because those conversations are already transcribed into text. There could be a program scanning Slashdot right now looking for keywords. In some ways, a telescreen is more acceptable because then someone had to decide they had a reason to monitor someone, then assign someone the full-time 24-hour-a-day job of doing it.
And yes, I read the book. Four times
That's a good example. Somewhere, somehow, a computer can now figure that out. But to determine that via a telescreen would require someone to spend years reviewing tapes, tracking your every move.