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Google's Real Name Policy, Why You Are the Product
bs0d3 writes "Google tells their investors: 'Who are our customers? Our customers are over one million advertisers, from small businesses targeting local customers to many of the world's largest global enterprises, who use Google AdWords to reach millions of users around the world.' Site users don't seem to understand. It's not that it's free. It's that you are the product being sold. ThomasMonopoly points out, 'I'm unaware of any company that feels responsible to their product. And if I'm to understand that they're responsible to their customers, the advertisers, I don't want "the world's largest global enterprises" dictating my identity or choosing who in Syria is granted a voice on the world stage.'"
So don't think it can't happen to you, as it has to me and I was following their rules
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
My thoughts, exactly. If you listen to radio, you are not the customer -- you're the product. If you watch television, you are not the customer -- you are the product. If you read most magazines (even if you pay for them), you are not a customer -- you're the product. When it comes to media of all kinds, you are the product far more often than you are the client.
That doesn't mean that privacy shouldn't still be valued, even in free services. It should be. But people need to approach it from the mindset that they are trading something valuable (their eyeballs and their personal data) in exchange. It'd be great if there was an alternative to all of these things, for those who would rather pay a few bucks than give up their "soul", so to speak. Unfortunately, the masses do not want to pay for anything, anywhere and catering to the niche who does is usually not so profitable, as a result.
As for their naming policy? It's entirely within their right to determine how they intend to curate the culture of their service and if it means there will be less fake names posting ridiculous crap on the service than are doing so on competing services and it will somehow elevate the general level of discourse compared to the competing services, then have at it. (This is not to endorse required identification for using the internet - only for using a particular service that is offered on a website to people on the internet.)
Of course, as far as a company doing no evil . . . I'm not aware of such a thing.
They're going to get run out of Germany on a rail if they keep pushing it... the Germans have very long memories of what can be done when your ID can be linked to your actions or what your religion is... Not only Nazi Germany using IBM provided technology to identify Jews and help round them up, But the East German Stasi with their requirements that all typewriters had to be registered with the authorities and samples of text provided... so they could try and track Samizdat newsletters to typists.
What seems a reasonable request for identification now, can very quickly become a nightmare if the government is taken over by an extreme right or left wing ideology who wish to start rounding up all dissidents
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Yes, they are. As you said, if they don't like Canada, they can kindly shutter their buildings and leave the fucking country. There are two parts to PIPEDA. The first is that a corporation cannot do ANYTHING with any information collected about a person unless that person has SIGNED a form indicating approval for that EXACT use. The second is that business cannot refuse to do business with somebody who doesn't want to "voluntarily" share personal information. You might be fine with BestBuy and such requiring (oh, sorry, you doublethink'd "require" into "mandatory request") you to turn over your email, phone number, and address in order to buy a cable, but in Canada we put a stop to that retarded practice. Stores have tried to skirt it "We need that information for our service of contacting you for recalls!" "I don't want that service" "It's mandatory!" it didn't go well for them.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI