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Schmidt: G+ 'Identity Service,' Not Social Network
David Gerard writes "Eric Schmidt has revealed that Google+ is an identity service, and the 'social network' bit is just bait. Schmidt says 'G+ is completely optional,' not mentioning that Google has admitted that deleting a G+ account will seriously downgrade your other Google services. As others have noted, Somewhere, there are two kids in a garage building a company whose motto will be 'Don't be Google.'"
will be sued the second they stick their heads out cause someone holds a patent of a fucking text entry box
On one hand, I cannot believe Google is doing this.
On the other hand, I cannot believe I fell for Google's "Don't Be Evil". While I used to wish for Google Wallet to come out and take over from Evil Paypal, at least, with Paypal, you know what they are doing. Always doing everything they can screw you over.
Google promises you with sweetness and honey... and then betrays you, which is even worse.
And for everyone who says you don't have to use G+ - it is *NOT* G+, it is Google Profile that is the problem, G+ is a component of Google Profile. If your Google Profile is disabled, a shit load of other services are impacted. Yeah, don't use Google. Sure.
Looking for alternatives now.
An optional service that is tied to other optional services.
You mad about your free optional services bro?
I use google for email, maps, and homepage for RSS feeds.
Any of those are taken away, I can find alternatives very easily.
[Google CEO Eric Schmidt] replied by saying that G+ was build primarily as an identity service, so fundamentally, it depends on people using their real names if they're going to build future products that leverage that information.
Straight from the horse's mouth:
You are the product, not the consumer.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Would it be too much to ask for people, when submitting a story, to keep their bias out of it and let us form our own opinion. If you want to voice your _opinion_, save it for the comments section. Let's leave story summaries to, you know, summaries.
This summary couldn't have been more obviously anti-Google biased if it tried. It's utterly tedious trying to stay informed about geek news while being bombarded with such overwhelming biases. Its annoying in the comments section, but that's where I expect to see it.
I know, I know. I must be new here...
It's kind of sad, but the evidence is getting stronger and stronger that capitalism is worse for the average person than communism, in spite of the failure of the USSR (which likely would not have occurred if not for the arms race pressure with the USA).
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
From the summary:
From the article
So the article is at complete opposites with the posted summary. Did the OP just link to the article because they thought more links would increase the chance of story acceptance, or were they deliberately trying to mislead?
If you used Gmail as your primary mailbox/frontend then it's quite painful. Yeah, it was free, but it's self defeating to punish people for trying out G+. I didn't for exactly this reason: I don't want to play with fire.
Been using alternatives a while ago. That includes Chrome and a zillion other services Google provides.
Google does evil, well duh, like everyone elses before when they become too big. And after that, they usually fall.
So far the only sensitive thing I have seen to counter that is to force the company into separate entities. It's what Samsung does, actually. It's not perfect - at all - but it's an attempt I suppose.
Oh. Is 'dringess' your real name, then? Or how exactly does this compare?
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and our "citation" is to a Google+ status update. Not an article. Not even a blog post. A status update. The conclusions from this summary don't even follow the post that was linked. This is just... bad.
Every time a post about G+ or Facebook pops up I am reminded of the good old days of IRC when you could socialize with your friends without going through an evil multinational corporation.
I can't even count the number of friends that I don't talk to anymore only because they abandoned IRC, or even real life get-togethers, for Facebook (and G+).
And the "bait" comment is completely fabricated.
It was an opinion. The author was saying "G+ pretends to be social networking in order to lure you in" (i.e., like bait)
In capitalism and fascism, the powerful betrays the consumers/subjects. And exploits them.
They only bullshitted you, when they, between the lines, said something like: you have a choice.
It reminds me of a George Carlin bit called, you have no rights, you have owners.
For the american audience:
No, I'm not a commie.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/google/229401282
Do you think they meant the Google+ identity service?
How many times does someone parrot the "oh, they're evil now"?
because they call it an identity service? really?
Troll less, please.
If you want to worry about a company, worry about facebook + microsoft working together.
While it is factual that those things occurred in that order, that was a minor economic cost for the USSR, the implication that it was causal is quite the stretch. The arms race was a massive cost.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Run your own crawler, web/mail server on a plug computer
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
It's the expectation.
With Microsoft and Facebook, you *KNOW* they are out to get you.
With Google, you don't expect it. My G+ profile was in limbo for over a month and I couldn't even get them to take a look at it - the damned "click this and we will review your name" link even disappeared!
It's like this - when your girlfriend or family spurns you and locks you out - you totally did not expect it, and the impact is far worse.
Gosh, Communism sure has worked out well everywhere else. You're obviously right. Communist policies such as taking land from farmers and parceling it out to the Common People who didn't know how or have any desire to farm were absolutely sound ideas, that only failed because of EVIL MEAN CAPITALISM!
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
Why are there reports that people lost Gmail access from earlier G+ account suspensions? Did Google actually do that, or were people confused somehow?
Google: Gmail suspensions are unrelated to Google+ suspensions. It's possible, and an unfortunate coincidence, for users to have both products suspended at the same time, for separate reasons. Earlier in the summer there was some confusion around SMS verification, which we addressed here.
I am considering "downgrading" my G+ account after reading this but let's not spread any fud here.
Having said that, I'm not quite sure why Google is being such a dick about this real name policy. It's really quite possible that they already know exactly who you are so they have all the info they need, so why give yourself such a bad buzz (pun intended) about this anal-retentive real names policy.
> a shit load of other services are impacted
The linked article quotes a Google spokesperson that the services impacted are, all told:
Am I the only one around here who wouldn't be impacted by that? I did play around with Buzz but frankly, I didn't use it much and wouldn't miss it.
It is not free. It is costing you your privacy. Apparently that is not worth anything to many people.
Privacy is the last freedom we have and we are handing it over as if it was never ours to have.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Exactly right.
Google may have started as a couple of college students creating a search engine and Facebook may have started as a couple of college students creating a social networking web site. But those days a long gone. Google and Facebook are not in the search or social networking business, they are in the ADVERTISING business. Their business model is now one thing and one thing only: collecting as much personal information about you as they can so they can sell it to advertisers.
If you really seriously have a problem with this, then DON'T FUCKING USE THEM. Seriously, how hard is that to figure out.
Then they would already have known that Violet Blue was really Violet Blue. This and other cases indicate that they (and Facebook) haven't the foggiest idea exactly (or even approximately) who you are. And don't care.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
wha?
you can pretty much make your entire profile invisible on g+. change the profile photo to something random, use a fake name, make sure every post is only seen by certain people.
Do you have any idea what you're talking about?
Yes, people have gotten locked out but it's rare and fake names *don't* get locked.
If you have an emotional attachment to a free online service offered by an advertising agency you have some real problems.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Therefore, I'm looking for a) a browser with a good cookiemanager or b) a "view 10-50 different browser processes as a tabbed browser".
b) Here I can start several different instances with their own profile, fully sandboxed by the OS (I hope)
a) Something that provides the same, but without me needing a new beefy computer.
Statements from Google which are on record and verifiable, versus anecdotal evidence of what happened to some undefined person. I somehow think I'm going to choose to believe Google on this one.
The current side effects of a Google Profile suspension, with confirmations by Google staff in various G+ posts, are:
Any other side effects reported until now have been labeled bugs and were not experienced by everyone consistently. Of particular note, a Profile suspension currently does NOT (modulo reappearing bugs?):
So that's the state of the world today. Whether it stays that way is up to debate, and I posited that question in my post that clarified the name policies as being an artifact of Profiles (including a reference proving that users can be banned without even having access to Google+ to begin with).
I suspect this is related to Google profiles not G+. YouTube used to have their own account/logon system. Google, over time, merged those YouTube accounts with Google profiles. This happened before G+ came about at all. You just happened not to use YouTube for a long time and logged in after opting in to G+ and so the merging called your google profile G+. I can't be sure that's what's going on, obviously, but I think that's probably what happened.
You think those guys on the side of the road with the orange jumpsuits have a choice about what they're doing? Or the ones making license plates, etc?
Yes. They do. All of them volunteered for that work because it gives them something to do. In fact, they are on waiting lists for MONTHS trying to score those gigs. It gives them a little money (usually a couple dollars an hour I think), some jobs even teach valuable skills for use when they get out, and most of all it gives them something to do.
Off course i like porn I'm a male and i hate the WII its graphics suck ass and i guess my spell checker missed curfue. And i don't know what your trying to say Your sayng I'm being tracked by everyone so i should just give up? Or i shouldn't single out Google for spying and tracking? And just because they can track doesn't make it right. I use an ad blocker,i delete cookies daily,i use host files, When i do buy something on the Internet i never click googles links o copy and paste the web address so google gets no credit for my click" so i do what i can. only bitch's give up. I at least make it as hard as i can. Oh and to answer your very first question,google it "google-tracking-news" There is plenty of proof.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Try DuckDuckGo
I've been using it as my primary search engine for months now and it's working well.
It's worse. http://botgirl.blogspot.com/2011/08/cnn-interview-reveals-more-from-eric.html had the perfect first post.
Google is building the Microsoft Passport. I DON'T WANT THAT SHIT.
If you have an emotional attachment to a free online service offered by an advertising agency you have some real problems.
If you're on a social network and have zero emotional attachment to the people you're networking with, you got some even bigger issues. By your logic I should also not get upset if I get locked out of my email account, since that too is a freebie offered by a company making money on advertising.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Being fuckheads over real names and account deletions are Google's way of rapping on your door and saying, 'Those services of ours you've been using for so long? Yeah. We just need a tiny favor from youse in order to keep this business relationship running smoothly. Capisce?
You can punish capitalists; the U.S. does it all the time. Hell, Google just paid the feds $500 million. Communism creates a gigantic, centralized government that's above the law, has no incentive to improve because it doesn't have to compete for money (its income is taken at gunpoint--just try not paying your taxes or showing up to court and see what happens), and is extremely difficult to overthrow if needed.
How long before this optional service starts to affect your normal browsing? Want Youtube? Gotta tie it to your Google account. Fine, have a fake one. But all of a sudden, you're required to use your real info. So now you can't access significant portions of the web without being under their umbrella.
If google gets big enough, once it pushes all the alternatives out of the market, or once the alternatives become somewhat irrelevant as to force you into google to be part of the internet "life", then it might become a case for the FTC, or equivalent government entity.
I thought you couldn't steal something that wasn't physically tangible? That's what Slashdot tells me in every piracy post.
Mr. Schmidt gets to explain that to the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 21st. That's on top of Google's other legal problems.
Google has to be very careful for the next two years, because of the terms of their non-prosecution deal with the Justice Department over the drug ads issue. This is the one where Google management had to admit criminal guilt and pay $500 million dollars. For the next two years, if Google does anything out of line in the drug-ad area, DOJ can, at their sole discretion, bring felony criminal charges for Google's past actions. Read that agreement between Google and DOJ. Nobody signs something like that unless going to trial would be much worse.
Peter Neronha, the U. S. attorney who headed the prosecution, issued a statement yesterday. He says that "Larry Page knew what was going on. We know it from the investigation. We simply know it from the documents we reviewed, witnesses that we interviewed, that Larry Page knew what was going on". He went on to say that "this is not two or three rogue employees at the customer service level doing this on their own. This was a corporate decision to engage in this conduct.", and called Google's attempts to control the problem "window dressing".
Google now has to clean up their act. It's not voluntary any more.
Wow, we really are jumping to the worst today. Deleting your G+ account does not downgrade anything else. If your account is suspended it will, at least until the suspension is resolved. That's why I deleted my G+ account, I wasn't prepared to put my real name on it, and I didn't want my other services (Blogger, Picasa, Calendar etc) to be affected. Deletion != suspension. I wish at least the submitter would RTFA.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
You can interpret it any positive way you want, but the point is that someone at Google finally admitted the true purpose of Google+. To many people, this isn't a big deal, but the Slashdot community has spent years portraying Google as a selfless open source company that does no evil. Since many here have stated their dislike of Facebook's privacy problems and cited that as a reason for using Google+, it's relevant to hear from Eric Schmidt himself that Google+ is data bait for a global megacorp's advertising platform.
and we are handing it over as if it was never ours to have.
you hit on a VERY key issue; and by that, I mean age.
many people who are online have grown up with there 'always being a high speed internet' that they have easy access to.
many have grown up not knowing what it was like to have privacy due to it being too much physical effort to surveil or too costly. now, with many of the g services its all too easy to have people spy on each other and of course have companies spy on you.
but a long time ago (20 yrs, lol) the barrier was much higher to pierce your veil of privacy. us grey hairs fully remember the assumption that your mail was not opened, your phone was not tapped, your car was not bugged. those were things 'commies did', not the US!
but ask a kid in his 20's today and they have not been around long enough to remember personal freedoms. they'll sign up for ANY stupid advertising based program if they get some free widget from it or discount on some product.
I am afraid that by the next generation, there will be zero notion of privacy or expectation of it. the 20's gen, right now, is pretty far along in their 'programming' (or conditioning). the next will be fully willing to be tracked if they get some perceived benefit from it.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Webcrawler sucked. Dogpile sucked. Yahoo sucked.
It all sucked.
Google is huge because they got search right first.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
"I choose to believe the words of the global megacorp over the personal experiences of users."
You think those guys on the side of the road with the orange jumpsuits have a choice about what they're doing? Or the ones making license plates, etc?
Where in the world do you get this stuff from? The Internet??? I worked in the prison systems and very few states have mandatory prisoner work rules. I would say 98% of the inmates work only because they like money and privileges that come with working. I know where I worked kitchen inmates ate better than non kitchen workers. I know that the industry workers made twice what any others made. I know that a ton of inmates refuse to work and sit and watch TV all day too. Most work because they want to.
"Remember, politicians and diapers should be changed often and for the same reason."
I'm seeing a lot of comments that if people don't like Google's policies, they shouldn't use Google. However, with Google's domination over Internet searching and over public email, it takes a fair amount of work to avoid using Google. And given the degree of social influence Google has attained, it really seems that the proper thing to do about a problem with Google's policies is to confront Google about it, not just run away and hide.
There was an email bulletin from the Free Software Foundation, complaining that 50% of their subscribers used Gmail. Outside work, almost all the personal email addresses I see in use are @gmail.com. On Slashdot, I'm used to frequent criticisms of Google, lauding of do-it-yourself system configuration, and lots of nerd rage whenever "cloud computing" comes up, so I found the reaction to Ask Slashdot: Self-Hosted Gmail Alternatives? astonishing, in that most of the responses were that the poster should stick with Google Apps for mail hosting, because self-hosting was too difficult. (I had been suggesting to my partner that I thought we should consider running our own mail server on our own Linux box, so I was reading that thread closely. I wouldn't have expected the Slashdot crowd to talk me out of it, but they did.)
At first, I liked the looks of Google+, because it seemed to show more planning to meet privacy concerns; however, the "real names" policy is a serious problem. If anybody's in a position to effectively challenge Facebook, a service I loathe, it's Google.
Some people throw around the claim that social networking services are not a necessity. The problem is, the definition of "necessity" is a social construction, human existence is social existence, and with social networking services, you're talking about the deliberate construction of a forum for constructing society. Opting out means a significant withdrawal from contemporary social life, especially for youth -- and this is a global pattern. It's more important when one looks at political developments around the world, of which Google is distinctly aware.
Opting out of Google services and ignoring the problem is not an effective response.
Even if their "actual money" comes from us (which is pure bullshit), their "actual wealth" comes from their labor. China still understands something that the US has forgotten: that labor always precedes capital, not the other way around. A stick lying on the ground isn't worth nearly as much as that stick carved into a beautiful cane.
The world doesn't need all that many software engineers or investment bankers. By blindly and foolishly destroying our labor-based economy, crushing unions, putting supply over demand, we've given away our seed corn and have thrown our national wealth away. Almost every one of you who are pre-retirement are losing ground, but you're too proud and too scared to admit it.
And the one hope that the US has of trying to turn it around is going to be discarded thanks to the sudden concern about deficits. Government austerity here in the US is going to work about as well here in the US as it has in Europe. It is impossible to turn around a downward trend by "shrinking government".
You have obviously not been to China in the past decade, nor have you ever spoken to a Chinese businessman.
Do you know that the same thing was said about the public works projects of the New Deal? They turned out to herald the greatest period of widespread growth and prosperity in US history. Here in the US, we're destroying our own prosperity and economic well-being for the benefit of a few powerful corporate groups. China is not only going to pass the US by economically, but in 25 years it will be superior socially and culturally too. But only if they can resist the pressure from the same corporate oligarchs that have just about finished destroying America.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It's worse. http://botgirl.blogspot.com/2011/08/cnn-interview-reveals-more-from-eric.html had the perfect first post.
Google is building the Microsoft Passport. I DON'T WANT THAT SHIT.
Does anyone else see the irony.
Google owns Blogspot/Blogger.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
Or their crime was complaining about the long lines in the grocery store. Or having a "nice" apartment that their neighbor wanted. Or just happening to be at a wrong place when a KGB official needed to have his quota fulfilled. Or having the wrong nationality or speaking the wrong language. Or fighting against nazism on the wrong front. Or having a distant relative who escaped to the west. And comparing the conditions in US prison system (arguably rather horrible, I agree with that) with concentration camps like those in the GULAG system is just offensive to all the victims of GULAG. You sound just like a some sort of holocaust denier.
I am not saying that there are no miscarriages of justice in the US, or that everything is all rosy here. Lot of crap does happen in here, but just the fact that we can talk about it here, complain about it, and fight it, shows the difference between a democratic or semi-democratic country like the US and a totalitarian regime like the communist countries of eastern Europe.
AccountKiller
I "deleted" my FB account months ago, and have no intentions of using G+.
Are there email services out there folks would recommend?
Are there any email services that use encrypted email on both ends?
Are they free?
Looking for recommendations.
Thanks.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
That's the opposite of volunteering. Like if I hold a gun to your head, and say 'work or I'll kill you' ... if you volunteer that's not a choice. Neither is it a choice if I offer to torture you or let you 'volunteer' to work. Neither is it a choice if I offer to put you in a box for the day, or work.
No, a choice would be: come out to the open road. There you can work, or not.
What the hell? Nobody's holding guns to anybody's head. Nobody's forcing the prisoners to work. They committed crimes and now they're in prison. They can either sit around in prison and do nothing or they can get a prison job and get a break from the ordinary. They do it entirely by choice. They're not in prison by choice, but they have the choice of making their stay more enjoyable.
FYI: Prison is a correctional system. It's a punishment for wrongdoing. It's also a rehabilitation for wrongdoers. Giving them choices about how they want to spend their time is a part of rehabilitation and assessment of whether or not they're fit to re-enter society. Nobody is forcing them to work, and they are free to hang out in the yard and lift weights for the next 10 years if they want, or they can do something different.
There seems to be a concerted effort to spew paranoia about Google lately. I recently listened to an interview with Scott Cleland about his book: 'Why You Can't Trust Google'. The whole thing reeked of a hit job. Mostly just imagining the worst possible implications of every 'questionable' thing Google does. But some out and out conspiracy theorizing too.
He describes how Google has 'copies of the entire web' as if there's any other way to provide the kind of search they provide. And somehow Bing (which, after all, is a direct clone of Google's business model) doesn't have such copies, or somehow has more benign plans for them.
He ranted on about how Android tracks your location. At least in this case, a caller noted that that's optional, but in any case, what about the iPhone?
He painted the 'wifi monitoring' scandal as if it were intended for sniffing your dirty laundry instead of to log wifi locations (as others have done) in order to build a triangulation system to augment GPS location.
Hell, there are folks right here ranting that Google's evil because they don't give away their core software - only millions of lines of other very useful stuff, but hey, evil is evil. And that kind of rant is nuts.
Make no mistake, Google's got lots of info. And they use it to sell targeted advertising. But, so far at least, they're not selling your identity to anyone (I'm not even sure they have your identity if all you use them for is search. And if they are building an identity service, there's still no indication that they plan to put it to evil purposes. I believe they're pretty clear about what they will and will not do with the info they have. But if they decided to go all evil one day, I guess that could be a problem. And never underestimate the potential for incompetence in maintaining all that info securely. So, start lobbying your govt stooges to get some privacy legislation. Still, no reason to act as if everything Google does has nefarious motives. More and more, I'm inclined to assign those motives to whoever is funding these backdoor attacks.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Altavista didn't suck, newfag.
That's the opposite of volunteering. Like if I hold a gun to your head, and say 'work or I'll kill you' ... if you volunteer that's not a choice. Neither is it a choice if I offer to torture you or let you 'volunteer' to work. Neither is it a choice if I offer to put you in a box for the day, or work.
That's not what's happening. You're not getting tortured if you don't choose to work, you simply remain in prison. Yes, you may argue that being imprisoned is torture, but the people working are still imprisoned.
No, a choice would be: come out to the open road. There you can work, or not.
C'mon...I'm the first to admit that we imprison far too many people for victimless crimes, especially with all the drug laws. That said, by your definition it's impossible to not be a slave. I can work or not, but if I choose not to work I won't have money to pay for shelter and food. In a sense, I'm being forced to work, but is that really the same as a gun to my head?
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Look at DIASPORA*: https://joindiaspora.com/
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Why are we glossing over companies like Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, Lodsys.... who do actual evil, anti-competitive shit and troll Google not because of what they've done, but because of what they might hypothetically do according to someone's blog post?
Not saying they're saints, but compared to the alternatives they pretty much are.
The 'nothing to hide' argument is perfectly valid when you're talking about a voluntary service that you have chosen to sign up for, as opposed to the government watching everyone
You are not seriously trying to argue with a guy that just blamed privacy for Soviet atrocities, are you?
Facebook also has a "real names" policy.
I find posts like yours amusing. Google has received near-constant stream of positive coverage on Slashdot and other sites for years, yet a few recent articles pointing out legitimate criticism is suddenly a "concerted effort to spew paranoia." You call other people nuts, but you should think about how your own post is coming off. There has been Google of criticism for as long as they've existed (I remember when Google's tracking cookie was a big deal), so it's not even a new thing, but because of so many high-profile projects going on at once, Google is getting more coverage, good and bad.
Nobody has said they're evil for not open sourcing the search engine. The point of bringing it up is to get people to realize that Google takes advantage of the positive feelings associated with "openness" by professing to be advocates of the philosophy, yet when it comes to their core business, they don't actually do what they claim to believe in. In other words, they're not a benevolent group of engineers trying to make the world better. They're a data-mining megacorp with a good PR department. There's nothing wrong with that on its own, but Google has gotten a pass on a lot of things from tech communities because of its use of Linux and open source and its competition with Microsoft and, now, Apple.
Again, I just find it quite funny that some people are so used to positive coverage of Google as the norm that a recent string of, to be quite honest, pretty tame criticism simply must be a conspiracy. I guess Slashdot editors are in on it too since they're accepting the submissions. Oh, and world governments who are investigating Google. Hell, maybe even Google's in on it since they recently paid $500 million to the feds.
Or maybe they're not perfect and are as worthy of receiving criticism as anyone else.
The UI was why I switched to Google, and why I switched form Google. The last straw was when they broke the text entry field. On every other text field in the system, up arrow jumps to the start, down arrow jumps to the end. With the Google search field, up arrow does nothing, down arrow invokes some autocompletion crap.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
There's nothing hamfisted about it.. people just don't understand that they have no right to demand Google make their products the way *they* want them to be. You don't pay them.. they don't owe you shit. If you don't like their free service then don't fucking use it.
If anything, they're guilty of being too politically correct. They should be just telling the whiners to fuck off.
How we know is more important than what we know.