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andrewduckerI don't actually think this is an evilness thing. I think they've noticed that Facebook is the only social site used by _everyone_ and is also the only site which insists on real names*. Therefore, they believe, that the only way to get non-geeks to use a social networking site is to make it about real people, using their real names.
After all, my father isn't going to add FluffyHairedGoth72, but he will add Andrew Ducker. So if Google want him on their service then they will have to make me use my real name**.
*Yes, I know lots of people use fake names, that's not really the point.
**Yes, I use my real name anyway, but I'm decidedly unusual in that respect.
After all, my father isn't going to add FluffyHairedGoth72, but he will add Andrew Ducker. So if Google want him on their service then they will have to make me use my real name**.
*Yes, I know lots of people use fake names, that's not really the point.
**Yes, I use my real name anyway, but I'm decidedly unusual in that respect.
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Date: 2011-07-26 10:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-26 10:27 pm (UTC)The quality of argumentation on this issue has been just shockingly poor. I mean seriously people have argued that it's illegal (gosh, if only there'd been some kind of test case where the policy had been tried before on some kind of small social network somewhere) or that it made no difference to the number of people using their real name (if only we could somehow compare such networks to see if, say, facebook had more real names than, say, dreamwidth).
Anyone who believes they're hiding their identity in a secure way by calling themselves "wibbler43" rather than "Dave Smith" probably needs saving from themselves.
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Date: 2011-07-26 10:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-27 02:14 am (UTC)To an extent, I agree, if you don't want to abide by the TOS, then don't sign up. Except...
1) Lots of people have been using Google products, with Google accounts, for years. All my Google products are integrated into one account. That happens to be in my real name, but I have friends otherwise, including one who simply can't use her legal name online (bad situation, won't discuss). When G+ was announced, it was an addon to existing stuff, better integration, etc. People already with accounts went in there.
2) The TOS require you use the name your friends and colleagues call you by. Not your legal name. But they've been suspending people for using personal names, including former Google employees with employee and visitor nametags with that pseudonym on. If the TOS said "use legal name as per legal documents", then that would be stupid, but at least acceptable. People have followed their TOS to the letter and spirit, and still been suspended.
3) Insisting on this as public data is illegal under at least two EU laws, and probably illegal under UK/English law. I'm making more enquiries there, but if they're doing business globally,t hey really do need to check out fairly basic requirements in one of their biggest markets.
Facebook tried to enforce real names only, and backed down. There hasn't been a test case because, amongst other things, EU trading law doesn't operate under Common Law in that way and no one has forced it before. Plus, it needs a big, anticipated, wanted product to make people care.
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Date: 2011-07-27 07:02 am (UTC)http://www.francisdavey.co.uk/2011/07/googles-name-policy-is-not-illegal.html
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Date: 2011-07-27 09:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-28 07:00 pm (UTC)2) Stupid I agree.
3) In that case I have some magic legal beans you may be interested in and can show you a blogpost saying they will grow into a magic legal beanstalk.
Facebook tried to enforce real names only, and backed down
Actually, facebook tried to enforce real names only, did enforce real names only and continue to block some accounts for this. Real names only is part of facebook's terms of use as is provision of accurate information. This is why the majority of people on facebook use real names -- which in turn is part of the site's success.
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Date: 2011-07-28 08:08 pm (UTC)3) I replied to Andrew on that post on the DW mirror when LJ was down, apparently his reasoning is that G+ isn't a communication network therefore it isn't covered by rules about communication networks. It's a network, and people use it to communicate. That's a big court case on its own.
1) The thing is, some of the people are following the TOS and are still being deleted.
But, meh, we shall see. If i wasn't feeling like shit I'd be chasing the equalities dept to look into it, but at the moment I don't have the energy, hopefully I'll be better in a few days. The ICO is looking into it, so there is a potential valid problem there.
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Date: 2011-07-28 08:19 pm (UTC)http://www.facebook.com/terms.php
From which:
"Facebook users provide their real names and information, and we need your help to keep it that way. Here are some commitments you make to us relating to registering and maintaining the security of your account:
You will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission...
.
.
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If we disable your account, you will not create another one without our permission.
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You will keep your contact information accurate and up-to-date."
The thing is, some of the people are following the TOS and are still being deleted.
Stupid as I said. As with so many things, facebook was there first. Don't you remember the "first they came for the indians" (native Americans)?
http://www.allfacebook.com/facebook-blocks-native-americans-2009-02
At least the evidence is there that it doesn't harm your success as a social network.
It's a network, and people use it to communicate.
Not the same thing by a long chalk.
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Date: 2011-07-28 08:33 pm (UTC)We'll have to see how it pans out on the legal point, as the relevent authorities have confirmed they're investigating.
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Date: 2011-07-27 04:10 am (UTC)"Wibbler43" wouldn't save me from the NSA, but it could save me from casual googling by an HR flunky who might be interviewing me. There are also more compelling use cases (murderous exes, witness protection, etc) that don't apply to me.
I've come to terms to using my real name on Google Plus, but I understand why some people have not. I think the requirement is a mistake.
If you don't want a social network where you use your real name don't use this one.
I don't make this decision. Everyone else in my life chooses what social network I will use. One may like Jabber as an instant messenger all one likes, but one can't use it if everyone else is on MSN.
People like Google Plus, if only because Facebook mistreats its users. Google Plus mistreating its users ruins the entire case for switching. If I want people to switch, I have to advocate for Google Plus to not mistreat its users.
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Date: 2011-07-28 07:24 pm (UTC)"Wibbler43" wouldn't save me from the NSA, but it could save me from casual googling by an HR flunky who might be interviewing me.
Timeline -- marked GUESS where I don't know.
GUESS 10-3 years ago -- NSA could probably deanonymise the average social network user without dumpster diving or real life tracking.
3-2 years ago -- skilled networks researcher could deanonymise the average social network user etc etc as part of six month research project.
Today -- competent networks researcher (I include myself) could deanonymise the average etc etc in one day to two weeks depending on person.
GUESS Next 2-5 years -- deanonymisation on archived social networks data from the previous several years is offered as a cheap automatic service to HR companies, or simply to members of the public wanting to "check out" tenants, potential partners etc. This maybe as paid for software, as a cheap service or using an ad-supported web site.
Caveat -- some of those are marked GUESS. I may be wrong. It maybe that like Germany we make laws to stop HR checking you out on facebook (or equivalent). It may be that archiving such data becomes illegal. It will certainly not be that it is too processor or hardware costly to do.
So, you *may* be right that what you do now or have already posted on a social network under a pseudonym will remain anonymous. I certainly would not bet *my* career on it.
I don't make this decision. Everyone else in my life chooses what social network I will use.
I'm sorry, but you're wrong in the second part. I was a facebook holdout for several years because I didn't want to obey certain parts of their ToS.
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Date: 2011-07-28 07:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-28 07:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-28 08:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-28 10:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-28 10:14 pm (UTC)We roundfiled it.
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Date: 2011-07-28 11:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-28 08:14 pm (UTC)Of course, I'm a decent employer, but...
Working in education, for example, I've seen colleagues get in trouble for stuff on their actual Facebook profile, but not on their pseudonymous LJ. An employer is almost certainly going to be able to find people fairly soon, but the question is how much will they care when it becomes obvious that most people are up to something online.
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Date: 2011-07-28 08:26 pm (UTC)An employer is almost certainly going to be able to find people fairly soon, but the question is how much will they care when it becomes obvious that most people are up to something online.
Absolutely. If you're using a pseudonym because you believe it can't be connected to your real name you're likely onto a big big loser in the short to medium future and, by the time you realise, you won't be able to delete stuff. However, if your publicly viewable online pecadillos under said pseudonym are not too uncommon then most employers will probably have grown up about the whole thing.
Then again I once had a friend who refused to employ someone on the grounds that their spice-girls fan page was too enthusiastic... I tried all means to talk him out of this stance I thought was both lunatic and prejudical but he wouldn't budge... not all employers are rational.
My own take is that I post fairly broadly stuff which is both moderately embarrassing and personal under my own name and publicly available. I believe it filters out employers I would not want to work for. [Slight embarrassment did occur when a colleague rushed into my office saying "I loved what you wrote about condoms, trying to get it 'digged up' right now" -- this was a few years ago when it was still OK to use digg you understand. "Um... hey, don't go to that trouble on my account."]
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Date: 2011-07-28 08:37 pm (UTC)Well, if I look for work in that sort of field, anyway, enjoying the school job currently, where it doesn't matter at all.
I can understand not employee a spice girls fan, but not on those grounds (well, unless it was creepy level enthusiasm, but...)
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Date: 2011-07-28 08:41 pm (UTC)I actually had a couple of students I knew were following my LJ. (Anything I post which is remotely concerned with individual students or student welfare is definitely locked down to friends only -- it's just professional).
Do you think an employer would consider a pseudonym mitigating "plausibly deniable" or incriminating "and they're trying to hide it"?
I certainly think employers should not discriminate on these grounds but social networks, like it or not, do blur the grounds between the public and the private and between what is trivially possible to find about a specific individual with little trouble. I think society is going to need to come to terms with this in a big way in the next 10-20 years.
At some point in the not-too-distant we're going to have senior public figures where their teenage pictures of them vomiting copiously in a campus bar are all widely available online. Perhaps when this is the case for every well-known public figure in media, politics and sport then we'll lose the fascination. (I mean, the free london papers have certainly cured me of any desire I might ever have to see any celebrity getting out of a taxi showing their underwear for example -- once upon a time such things might have been rare).
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Date: 2011-07-28 08:53 pm (UTC)So yeah, as it becomes common, we'll simply not care. "Oh, I can see the wife of the PResident of France naked. Lucky git"
For the trying to hide/deniability thing? It'll depend on circumstances and employer, like you said, a decent employer will look better on it. And I suspect with the economy staying as fragile, the better employers will start to do better overall as time progresses, at least in the "knowledge economy" sectors, which is increasingly all of them.
And I don't post anything about work now, although I sometimes think about it. I even post less about the political stuff I do, which is a bit daft given how much work I built into building up for a political presence.
Ah well.
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Date: 2011-07-28 09:56 pm (UTC)(And other stuff too)
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Date: 2011-07-28 09:59 pm (UTC)To some extent, to some extent... the youthful exploits of Cameron, Blair etc were widely publicised from a handful of photos. Now, perhaps it is just my friends circle, but I think that for almost any one of my friends I could compile a far more embarrassing dossier from social networks. Not to mention the time they got drunk and posted to the network that they'd like to invade Poland or have sex with a given actress not to mention the video footage of them unconscious on the stairs at a party... not to mention...
I hope your (and my) vision of it becoming so common we'll not care is the correct one. It will become easier for the media to pick and choose images, phrases and sound bytes to make people sound like anything they want.
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Date: 2011-07-28 10:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-28 10:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-26 11:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-27 06:57 am (UTC)And I think that you're unusual in having friends with names like that (as am I), because fandom is full of weirdos (like you, and me, and 3/4 of my friends list). We're corner cases, not the norm.
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Date: 2011-07-28 07:16 pm (UTC)It's about expectations and inclusion. The "nickname" thing is very offputting to the non-geek mindset. About 22 years ago I was a heavy user of a University bulletin board. We used to have pubmeets etc. I remember inviting a friend who'd sort of casually followed my interest without ever signing up.
"Would you like to come to the pub with my friends?"
"God, you won't all be calling yourself Steerpike and Sparrowhawk will you?"
If you're a long-term computer user it's hard to remember quite how alienating that culture is to people who are not used to it.
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Date: 2011-07-26 11:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-27 07:00 am (UTC)If the restriction bothers you, then don't use it. Google have stated that they're fine with this.
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Date: 2011-07-27 12:57 am (UTC)And as long as they insist on it, I see no reason to use the service.
I only use Facebook because FB has a proprietary email system with no gateway and 700 million user accounts. If FB open up their messaging to SMTP/IMAP, I'd delete my account.
It's not about wanting to use a silly pseudonym and all about wanting to partition chunks of my life in such a way that certain people can't find those chunks unless I give them a handle. Until G+ get that, they can fuck off.
NB: I gather accounts on G+ are deleted for having punctuation marks, including periods, in them. As I'm charlie.stross@gmail ...
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Date: 2011-07-27 02:20 am (UTC)Playing advocate here, but a) that's surely exactly what Circles is there for, to be able to post stuff only to those you trust with the info? and b) Doesn't everyone know you're autopope anyway?
Posting something as autopope under a filter here is no more or less secure than posting it as Charlie under a circle there, surely? (Assuming we trust Google staff more/as much as we trust SupFabrik staff)
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Date: 2011-07-27 09:48 am (UTC)And I'm not saying that
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Date: 2011-07-27 07:37 pm (UTC)In answer to (b), NO, not everyone knows I'm autopope. And if I suspected you were spreading that info around I'd unfriend you, or even have to delete my LJ. It is friends-locked for a REASON.
In answer to (a), I R Famus Persunn. (Not as famous as, say, Neil Gaiman, but too damn famous for comfort.) The rules of social behaviour change under such circumstances. For example, I can devastate an aspiring author by, say, posting my real unvarnished opinions of their work. And it's no good saying "you can post it to a restricted circle, though", because we have this interesting software function called "cut and paste". Information leaks, and if I wanted to write honest book reviews with negative comments I'd have to be able to do so deniably, under a pseudonym. Using the pseudonym means I'm not talking ex cathedra as "Charlie Stross, multiple Hugo-winning Authority On SF", but as Joe Random Person expressing a personal opinion.
And that's before we contemplate the reasons other people might have for wanting multiple IDs. People fleeing from abusive partners, for example. Or stalkers.
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Date: 2011-07-27 08:01 pm (UTC)But yeah, I get the need to not be linked to negative stuff (I'm increasingly careful these days about party colleagues being daft, for example, especially local colleagues), but take the approach that I can trust those I do share with-I suspect it would be different if I get elected to something national, but that's not currently on the cards.
And I've picked people up for sharing screenshots and similar of stuff posted to Twitter that clearly has the locked logo, coming from LJ &c that's clearly WRONG, but to those coming in from other internet approaches, not so much.
re the first? I genuinely thought it was fairly public knowledge as a) website URL has a misspelling that was explained ont he site somewhere (I recall reading a "why antipope" thing somewhere), and b) comment I was replying to has your partial email address with full name.
I get the "no sharing stuff" and would never break that confidence for anyone (not that I can with you, you've not given me access to here or DW), but it's not a very well concealed secret-concealed enough for what you need, I suspect, but that's about it.
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Date: 2011-07-28 07:41 pm (UTC)It is on your publicly available livejournal user info you know (as is a link to your blog). Your wikipedia page links to this account. Anyone who wants to know or is sufficient of a fan to look at wikipedia or knows you are autopope. (In my case I can't even remember how I knew, I doubt through
Sorry, I'm genuinely not trying to be snarky, just if you're under the impression the account is somehow deniable, secret or not trivially attached to your real name and use the account accordingly then you probably want to rethink. I'm not trying to offend, just worried by what you seem to think about the degree of detachment between the identities.
If you're fine with that and you simply mean that you have a pseudonym so people know you are talking under that pseudonym not "officially" then sorry to have interrupted.
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Date: 2011-07-29 11:44 pm (UTC)If I wanted true anonymity we wouldn't be having this discussion.
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Date: 2011-08-01 08:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-31 12:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-31 02:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-31 03:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-31 04:00 pm (UTC)