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."

Comments

Youtube Comments

[exomondo]

I see the only major impact of this being that people can now leave pseudonymous comments on Youtube again.

Re:Youtube Comments

[sd4f]

After so long of not posting comments (i may have been able, but youtube just started annoying me too much to bother, with all these screens that desperately wanted to know who I am and create google+ accounts), I no longer care. They can keep their commenting system.

Re:Youtube Comments

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here. Sometimes I go to leave a comment on a youtube video but then it prompts me to set up a Google+ account.

So I just don't comment instead.

Re:Youtube Comments

[lord_mike]

And Google Play comments, too...

Re:Youtube Comments

[Darinbob]

Google+ is not about a popularity contest. It's about being social without being on facebook, or keeping track of special interest groups (including celebreties). The only real problem with Google+ was that it wanted to tie you to other stupid services like youtube, without even letting you go slumming on a separate account. Google should have left it alone instead of trying to get a one-acount-fits-all login (trying too hard to be a facebook clone instead of being something better).

Re:Youtube Comments

[sumdumass]

Sort off. what they do is send links asking if you know certain people and give the names. They also have a link for if they misidentified them.

So some sorry sap will help them check your drivers license. It's probably someone who you worked with 10 years ago or who has seen you at a pub or something too. I get these all the time for random people in my area. I tend to shorten my name when signing up for crap and they ended up with my full name and I bet it was this exactly. I know the people they ask me if I know- they are geo-locating your ip or something to pass them around.

Re:Youtube Comments

[Glarimore]

There's no reason to be contributing to that pool of bile anyway. Youtube comments are notoriously atrocious.

Re:Youtube Comments

[sumdumass]

It was probably easier for them to tie all the data they collect to you with one account. That's what they seem to be after anyways, data.

Re:Youtube Comments

[Anonymous Coward]

Too little, too late in my case. I've managed to live without it for so long now, I won't be bothering.

Re:Youtube Comments

[fractoid]

I don't think that would have made that much difference to them, honestly. They already have pretty much all of your data.

My issue with it was that while I've come to terms with Google knowing everything about me, it doesn't follow that I'm OK with everyone else knowing everything about me.

Re:Youtube Comments

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no reason to be contributing to that pool of bile anyway. Youtube comments are notoriously atrocious.

They got worse with the redesign, though.

Old and busted: You could always look at page 1/2/3 of the comments or binary-search your way through the pages (pre-page-57 or post-page 57? pre-page 84 or post-page-84?) if a video that hadn't been relevant for ages became relevant. At 100 comments per page, all displayed in full, and popping tabs for each page with a bunch of middle-clicks, it was relatively easy to skim through the 99.99% of the shit to find the 0.01% you wanted
New hotness: Some fucking UXtard goes for infinite scroll, and you have to click to expand subthreads, and then click to expand any comment longer than three lines in any subthread.

Every time a UX designer fucks with something to make it more mobile-friendly, they make it less usable for both desktop and mobile users.

Re:Youtube Comments

[currently_awake]

The news here is Google has found they don't need you to give your real name anymore, that they have found other ways to get that without actually asking.

Re:Youtube Comments

[satuon]

I made a JavaScript script that auto-clicks the "Show more comments" button every second, and I would leave it for a while. It can easily uncover 2000-3000 comments. It makes Chrome use up all the RAM though, I can't believe how much RAM you need to display a few thousand lines of text.

Re:Youtube Comments

[horza]

Same with me and Google Play for Android apps. I can't even give apps a * rating. Forget that.

Phillip.

Re:Youtube Comments

[horza]

The real-name G+ kept me away as I knew it was doomed. Many of my female friends use an alias, or a mis-spelled name, to avoid stalkers or getting hassled. Few of my guy friends would want to be on a service with no women on. Even I have 2 FB accounts, one for work friends and another for family. The fatal flaw, the one that killed various biometric companies as well as G+, is that in real life we are different people at different times. The person you are at work is not necessarily the person that is on a picnic with his family taking snaps of his loved ones or of wildlife.

Phillip.

Re:Youtube Comments

[coastwalker]

The information on the web is steadily disappearing behind shit UI designs. So many information sites of one kind or another have gone all flash, all icons, all pictures, all randomly spread over the page like vomit and repeated at random intervals in random blocks of "stuff you must see".

Fortunately slidy tiles will be out of fashion eventually and we can all laugh at the people who think they are cool as we should be doing now.

Re:Youtube Comments

[Alioth]

The whole problem is UX designers exist. I don't want a user experience. If a user interface is giving me an experience, it's getting in the way of what I want to do. User interfaces should melt into the background and explicitly NOT give me an experience. I should barely notice the user interface.

We need to get rid of UX designers and replace them with competent UI designers instead.

Re:Youtube Comments

[Runaway1956]

On this subject, you and I are in complete agreement. If I want an "experience", I'll put some music on, or a video, or a game. Almost nothing else on my computer should be an "experience" at all. Just serve up the information, and let me get to it, thank you very much. Didn't the world almost unanimously reject Clippy? Someone should have learned from Microsoft's mistake.

In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

"Now that our pseudonym to single user identity resolution algorithm is reasonably accurate, go right ahead and make up a fake name."

Re:In other words

[osu-neko]

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.

Re:In other words

[X0563511]

Sure. I don't care about Google knowing my name. I care about schmucks on Youtube knowing my name.

Re:In other words

[spikenerd]

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!

Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now Google+ is sure to become the popular destination it's always been destined to be! I'm going to go on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Reddit and Tumblr and a site with Disqus and tell everyone it's time for Google+! Then I'll pull down my pants and tell all my friends on SnapChat!

Bullshit + News = Pointless

[danknight48]

- The news Story = " removed all restrictions on what usernames people are allowed to use"
- So i clicked "Edit your name:"
- I enter "4D", in the name field

Result = "Please fill in the name fields."

Garbage news for a garbage product. Did any of the devs even think to "test it"?

..unnecessarily difficult experiences for some..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes,
Unnecessarily difficult, because google either already knows who you are (via some other registered service(s) i.e. Adwords etc) or will link in a relationship to your choosen "Pseudonym" to your real name, web history and other online events later on anyway.

So yeah google, what a stupid idea.

Re:Anonymous Coward for the WIN!!

[Snufu]

Actually, "Anonymous Coward for the WIN!" should be the headline of this story.

This is bad

[geekoid]

having to use real names has made it far less trollish then other places.

Anonymity makes sense for special cases.

[Snufu]

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.

Re:Anonymity makes sense for special cases.

[penix1]

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.

The same happened with my hometown paper but the reverse is true. They went from a moderated (meaning the spam and abusive posts were never posted since posts had to be pre-approved) with lots of insightful comments to almost no comments what-so-ever and the few that were commenting were doing so from fake FB accounts. So the noise ratio went way up on the comments they were getting. In short, they replaced their working moderation system with the FB system thinking the same way you do and got exactly the opposite effect.

Re:Anonymity makes sense for special cases.

[jeIIomizer]

Whistleblowing, witness protection, for example. For most other cases anonymity degenerates into a cesspool of behavior that is not accepted in normal society.

People suppress their true nature in "normal society." "normal society" bores me to tears.

Overnoght the forum changed from endless spam and trolling to respectful discourse between actual people.

More like useless, non-controversial discourse. By tying everything to real names, you make it less likely that anyone will do anything controversial, even when it needs to be done. Who knows if a future employer will decide to not hire you because you said something they don't like, even if you thought it was completely innocuous?

I'd rather deal with trolls and spam than have "respectful discourse" between fake people.

Re:Anonymity makes sense for special cases.

[Anonymous Coward]

Using real identities will also mean that some people will decide to never comment, because they value their privacy. For every troll you discourage by using their "real name" (probably not their real name anyway, and they always make a new account or connect from a different IP), you'll lose many other people who would have given useful comments, but won't do so if they were going to be identifiable. You will never know what you're missing. Really, a comment should be evaluated regardless of who the person is, and the little bit of accountability added by having names is a poor shortcut for a proper moderation system.

It accomplishes "look, we're doing something", and sure the trolls may diminish, but how many other people leave? I suppose you could assume that if people aren't willing to identify themselves, they must not have anything useful to say, but in my experience people who post anonymously sometimes are able to say things first-hand about issues that they otherwise wouldn't disclose at all. Sometimes that's pretty important stuff, like talking about their job or a competitor's better product. It doesn't have to be as dramatic as legal whistleblowing or witness protection.

Re:Anonymity makes sense for special cases.

[seebs]

You're failing to distinguish between anonymity and pseudonymity.

You could argue that "seebs" isn't my "real name", although it's the only name I reliably answer to. But I've got ~30 years of history using this name, and nowhere near as much visible history under the name on my government ID, so this is the one I care about.

Re:The Internet is meant to be anonymous

[William Baric]

Restore the glory of the Internet? You mean to go back to a time when most people posted on Usenet with their real name and email address as their signature? The time when even political discussions were civilized?

From my point of view, anonymity was the worst thing that happened to the Internet.

Re:They did that now?

[penix1]

No... No... No... No! Those are his clones. The REAL Adolph Hitler lives in Argentina...

What great news!

[93 Escort Wagon]

Everyone is chatting about it on Twitter and Facebook!

Re:The Internet is meant to be anonymous

[seebs]

How do you know whether those were their "real name"? I knew a guy who once got interviewed for a newspaper, and they reported his name exactly as written; Tsu Dho Nimh.

Re:The Internet is meant to be anonymous

[jeIIomizer]

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.

Too Little, Too Late

[billstewart]

Google+ was trying to be a social network, and one of Google's execs (I think Eric?) also described it as an "identity service", which is something advertisers may want but slightly fewer than zero readers and writers actually wanted. No Facebook kill here, even if it does stick around longer than Orkut (which mainly took off because John Perry Barlow gave a bunch of invites to friends in Brazil, and Brazilians thought it was a great service for gossip.)