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Pseudonyms Now Allowed On Google+
An anonymous reader writes When Google+ launched, it received criticism across the internet for requiring that users register with their real names. Now, Google has finally relented and removed all restrictions on what usernames people are allowed to use. The company said, "We know you've been calling for this change for a while. We know that our names policy has been unclear, and this has led to some unnecessarily difficult experiences for some of our users. For this we apologize, and we hope that today's change is a step toward making Google+ the welcoming and inclusive place that we want it to be."
I see the only major impact of this being that people can now leave pseudonymous comments on Youtube again.
Yeah, I already figured Google knows who I am and what all my aliases are anyhow. It's not Google I'm trying to keep from putting the pieces together, it's J. Random HR twerp who doesn't need to know my hobbies and kinks to determine if I'm qualified for the job.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
having to use real names has made it far less trollish then other places.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Sure. I don't care about Google knowing my name. I care about schmucks on Youtube knowing my name.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Whistleblowing, witness protection, for example. For most other cases anonymity degenerates into a cesspool of behavior that is not accepted in normal society. See every unmoderated anonymous internet forum ever.
Using real identities can vastly improve internet behavior. For example, a forum I frequent recently switched from anonymous posting to Facebook accounts. Overnoght the forum changed from endless spam and trolling to respectful discourse between actual people.
No... No... No... No! Those are his clones. The REAL Adolph Hitler lives in Argentina...
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
With "say controversial things" you mean trolling?
Is that seriously the only thing you can think of? Take controversial topics like child porn, pedophilia, etc. Get on the 'wrong' side of an argument and you may find yourself the target of an angry mob - perhaps literally.
Don't you think life would be better for you if you could assume who you are and what you think instead of having to hide and having to be a hypocrite?
Don't you think life would be better if the world was perfect? Well, it isn't. You risk not being hired, being fired, losing many opportunities, and being harassed by the government. You also chase away people who don't want any of the things I just listed to happen to them. Maybe you expect people to just ignore all that, but the fact is, people don't. Some people change and convince themselves that they're being themselves, even when they're not. I don't want to hang out with fake people.
Besides, I like my privacy. I like knowing that it's difficult to tie many things to me.
Do you like it when people lie to you in order to obtain some kind of friendship from you?
No, that's why I like anonymity.
But my guess is you never posted anything which could justify it.
You base this on nothing. And since when is this just about me? I'm more afraid of others ceasing to produce insightful and thought provoking content, all in the name of stopping "trolling," something that only thin-skinned people have trouble dealing with anyway.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Yeah, I already figured Google knows who I am and what all my aliases are anyhow.
You are absolutely right, but abandoning pseudonymity based on this reasoning reflects a common misunderstanding about how data mining works. Please don't give up so easily. You see, organizations that scrape and aggregate data from the web can only probabilistically connect all your aliases. That is, they only know with 97.3% certainty that YouTubeTrollKing7 is the same person as osu-neko, and they only know with 98.5% certainty that osu-neko is Brian Nekomori who attends Oregon State University (I made that up, by the way). That may not be the kind of privacy you would prefer, but it buys a lot of freedom, especially if everyone does it. You see, the Internet is kind of big, and man-hunts involve skewed data. (That is, most people are not the person they are looking for.) Since false-positives create big headaches for data miners, they tend to set their thresholds very high. For example, if they set their thresholds at 99.5%, those pseudonyms will not be recognized as connected to you.
So, what does this buy you? Well, it's not enough that you can go around committing crimes and expect the FBI to never find you. But, on the other hand, they're going to have a hard time achieving a conviction if they cannot find any other supporting evidence. Furthermore, people just don't seem to understand the power of exponential decay that occurs with probabilities. The more pseudonyms you use, the more the probabilistic connections among them decay into the low 90's, making it extremely cumbersome to link them all together. Imagine having to filter through the 0.01% of Internet posts that happen to falsely connect with your pseudonymns with high probability! No one wants to do that, so guess what, you have some privacy.
So, don't give up on pseudonymity. Yes, data mining is real, but no, it is not omniscient. Pseudonymity doesn't defeat it, but it makes them pay a dear price for finding you. Make them pay to know who you are. If everyone does it, the whole industry stops being so lucrative. The very reason data mining pays off so well right now is because of people who take the attitude that "it doesn't matter because they know anyway". So, stop it!