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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...
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?
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.
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+).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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...