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Google Is Dropping Its Google+ Requirement Across All Products Including YouTube
An anonymous reader writes: After years of plugging Google+ into all of its services, today Google announced that your Google+ profile will no longer be your identity in all its products. The company says it will take a few months for all the changes to happen, but the first product to be uncoupled will be YouTube. Bradley Horowitz, Google's vice president of streams, photos, and sharing, says the changes are a response to user feedback: "We've also heard that it doesn't make sense for your Google+ profile to be your identity in all the other Google products you use."
I hadn't heard much of it lately.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Obligatory comic here: http://owlturd.com/post/730466...
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Personally I didn't mind this feature.
I hate juggling accounts, I hope this doesn't mean I'll need a YouTube account AND a gmail account.
Personally I prefer having separate accounts. It's too easy to track down information with linked accounts. People don't realize how much information is publicly available and what consequences that can have. Heck, even without linked accounts it's far too easy. I once tracked down someone, at their request, starting with only a username on a single forum. On that forum they'd mentioned their cats names in a single post. From that I was able to identify their postings as anonymous users, their real name, address, social media profiles, and so on. The scary part, it took me less than an hour to compile all the information. The only reason it took that long is because there was a lady in Florida with the same cat names which had to be teased out of the data. Another individual I tracked, I was able to identify where they lived, what they drove, how long they'd lived in their home, what they paid for it, what they pay in taxes, what instrument they played in a band, etc... so many details of their life just out in the open. I got all of that starting from a single tweet on an account they'd only sent 8 tweets from and deleted; it just happened to have been cached by Google.
One problem with Google+ in my opinion was that G+ would be like Facebook if Facebook had perfect information on every one of your habits/actions/locations. When you have to use it to sign in to everything, it approaches the creepy line that a lot of people have.
It's similar to how a lot of discussion forums, etc. encourage or force Facebook logins to post. You'd think that would keep people at bay, but all that vitriolic hatred you see on news forums, etc. is right there next to people's pictures and occupations -- "Joe User - 7th Grade Social Studies teacher at Somewhereville Middle School." I once thought, "No one could be that dumb, posting trash like that as a public figure with their real ID." Sure enough, go look for the person on LinkedIn, there he is with a matching picture, etc. People really have zero knowledge about how social media works, what the companies use the data for, or anything about online privacy.