AndiS

G+ was my public-facing platform, the place where I engaged with people who I didn't know (most of my posts are public there.) It's separate from my normal online identity, deliberately (the people who read my friendslocked posts in my own space know about my G+ nym and profile, but I chose not to connect it to my normal nym and other personal information.)

I've found it to be an interesting, valuable, informative way to keep up with news, to meet people whose social spheres I wouldn't have otherwise encountered, and to have thoughtful, ongoing conversations. It's a space where I'm engaged in political, social, and specific-group-related commentary (gender and sexual minorities, disability-related discussions.)

I knew that, by using G+ publicly, I was giving up a carefully-considered amount of privacy -- but that was associated with a single nym, not my larger online identity.

Does Google know who I am? Yeah, sure. What I didn't want was Joe Public (or, worse, Joe YouTube) being able to track me cross-platform, which is why I never associated it with my normal persistent pseudonym or my other spheres of online activity.

I'm criticizing G+ from G+, because I'd love to see some changes made by Google. That's the best way I have of reaching an audience that includes Google employees, and it's also the platform where I've had the most frequent discussions of online privacy, etc.

Sure, I could try to go in and delete everything I've ever posted, now that Google has pulled its latest anti-privacy move. What, exactly, would that accomplish? It's still cached, and as various people will tell you, it's difficult to fully delete a G+ profile, unless you'd like to give up using all Google services (and I have yet to find a mail provider who gives me similar utility for free, or for a low price.)

I didn't mind the targeted ads in Gmail, they were the price I paid for using the service. What I do mind is the forced merging and integration of activities and nyms which users had repeatedly requested not be merged (I declined to merge my YT account repeatedly.)

Since I wasn't an active YT user, and I was able to re-link my YT profile to a dead-end G+ page after the fact, I have not been directly harmed.

But if I'd been someone who was an active YT content provider on a controversial subject, for example, or if I'd been outed in some way by the merge, or if I'd actually FOLLOWED Google's real-name policy and used my full legal name as they had wanted, there was certainly the potential for substantial harm to be done -- because that allows people to follow me (and other users) home -- both virtually and physically.

Google's convenience for data-marketing shouldn't outweigh personal safety or privacy concerns. I'm less distressed by their having the information available than I am with them sharing it with the public, after repeatedly declining their "offer" and not being given the option to opt-out.

The existence of a work-around (a dead-end "page") does not mean that the action was an acceptable one to take in the first place -- and it took a savvy user advising me of the work-around to cause me to look up how to do it . . . there wasn't an option for me to do so at the time they merged my accounts, which would have solved a lot of the related privacy concerns.

To be clear, that wasn't my term (it was the title of a link that I reposted), but I agree with you -- I'd have personally chosen something with less of the weight of history and atrocity behind it.

BTW, nothing like a casual doxxing on a public forum to make my point about the need for real privacy controls, and how unsafe lack of anonymity/effective pseudonymity on the web can make women, in particular, feel.

Congratulations, I've changed my G+ photo for the first time since I created the account.

Until now, I never felt uncomfortable having a photo of myself there, even though it meant that I had to deal with some small amount of unwelcome comments, and plenty of not-unwelcome flirty comments (which I'm fine with, I'm a flirty person, and I enjoy good banter. I'm not interested in anything more than that, and crude come-ons got deleted immediately, but I didn't mind the occasional complimentary exchange. If I'd had a problem with it, I would have used a different photo, or an image that didn't show my face.)

Google Image Search didn't exist at the time that I created my site, and my Flickr account also predated it.

You say that "anonymity is only effective if you practice consistent inconsistency" -- but if your goal is a persistent pseudonym which allows for ongoing human interaction over years, you're almost inevitably going to let some type of identifying information slip.

Your comment sounds suspiciously like victim-blaming in this case -- I never claimed to be an incredibly tech-savvy privacy specialist, I'm an an ordinary user of multiple online services and social platforms, and while my attempts to create walls between some of those identities may have been inadequate, they should have been respected.

I present as the same persistent pseudonym in most places, so it's fairly easy to track me through that method -- but that was deliberate, so that people could recognize my username cross-platform.

Since G+ was the one platform where I was doing a lot of public engagement with strangers, I chose a different nym, and deliberately didn't connect those identities. And, again, Google's products broke down those walls -- in this case, inspired by your actions rather than an automated merge, but still a privacy violation powered by Google.

No, putting a user's real name into YouTube isn't the whole of the problem. But it's a symptom of the contraction of identity that Google's products are forcing, even if users have actually taken active steps (and many people have taken more steps than I have, including creating multiple Gmail accounts under different identities) to try to protect their identity privacy and to keep their various online identities from merging.

What Amagumori said -- I can block/delete harassing comments (and do, on a regular basis), but I am far more concerned with murder/rape threats from people who know where I live.

I'm a big girl, I can deal with crude come-ons appropriately (which is to say, snort/fume depending on the content, then report, block, and delete.)

What concerns me is the unwanted linking of trackable personal information, through a service that had been repeatedly declined by the user in question.

I'm thankful that I am not in compliance with Google's "real-name" policy, or else I'd potentially have harassers showing up at my door -- and that's a shitty, uncomfortable, violated feeling to be experiencing, because Google broke my trust after I told them that I didn't want to share that information, and they shared it anyway, without giving me a chance to opt out.

In this case, no actual harm was done. However, it illustrates the potential for harm very clearly -- when you require "real names" (and, in some cases, enforce that with requests for drivers-license scans, etc., as has happened a number of times since the G+ nymwars started), you must respect your users' privacy choices about how they want those names to be shared with the public.

All it takes is one stalker, one violent ex, one deranged family member, and their real-name policy, combined with the collapse of walls that users set up for self-protection, is a recipe for preventable tragedy.

I have since linked it to a dead-end G+ page. However, I wasn't given the option to do so initially -- I was confronted with my name and photo appearing on a comment that I'd been leaving under my YT identity (which is deliberately blank, doesn't identify gender, etc.)

The fact that it's possible to get around this idiotic move doesn't mean that it should have been made in the first place.

Thank you for the suggestion -- it certainly would have worked out much better if that had been the procedure that I was initially presented with, rather than clicking a number of times to refuse the link (on multiple occasions, spanning weeks), and then having the link forced without my permission, and with no opt-out option visible.

My daughter specifically avoided creating a Facebook account until she went to university -- however, one of her classes had meetings which were calendared and discussed on a private FB group, so she had to join in order to participate in the class.

She used an alias that would be recognizable to her classmates -- but, like you, she didn't want her legal name to be easily searchable by prospective employers, health-insurance companies, estranged family members, bad-breakup exes, etc.

But, yes -- having a unique name makes anonymity and privacy more complex. And it shouldn't -- it penalizes people for the name they were BORN with, just because they can't blend into a sea of Bob/Joe/Sue/Tran/Wei names, which are more common.

The ability to create a persistent pseudonym and to use it for unmuzzled online discourse is especially vital for people who would be all-too-easy to track down otherwise . . . but I think that it's still essential in terms of free-speech and privacy concerns for everyone.

OP here -- I am absolutely in favor of persistent pseudonyms associated with a user-generated reputation system, as discussed here:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/102524008019896509925/posts/ivyA...

However, there are significant safety issues associated with requiring people to use their legal names for online discussions, and I think that it will seriously muzzle political dissent, social movements which don't currently enjoy mainstream support, gender and sexual minority group discussions, the creation of "safe spaces" (which, I realize, are something of an illusion, but still have value), and vigorous intellectual discourse.

I certainly wouldn't have been comfortable being as politically and socially outspoken as I am on G+ (a deliberately public-facing persona with a unique nym for that purpose), if I had been forced to use my full legal name for the purpose.

Given some of the hate and harassment that has been directed my way (and, honestly, I've gotten off light compared to many), I absolutely would not feel safe engaging in some of those discussions if my name, phone number, and location were easily accessible.

I know that it's difficult to completely compartmentalize between nyms and platform identities, but I think that the ability to choose which face is forward, appropriate to the social group that you're engaging with, is an important part of the human experience.

If you don't want your boss and your grandmother reading your opinions on politics, social issues, sexuality, etc., then a pseudonym is the obvious answer -- and I've seen any number of sites (LiveJournal is a particular favorite) implement granular controls on privacy, in order to establish nym identity and reputation, while still allowing users to speak to their chosen audience.

Can you ever be truly private? Probably not. But it's important to be able to have some form of shield from the casual observer, to have a name and identity that you choose, rather than having one chosen for you, which may reveal far more than you intended.

Yes, I post publicly on G+, and sacrifice some level of privacy in doing so -- I do it because I enjoy the level of discourse on that site, and talking with interesting strangers is part of the fun. On the other hand, I deliberately didn't link that profile with any of my other online identities . . . and, while I may not have done a perfect job of it, I at least did my best to create walls between those personae.

As Dredmorbius said, it's important that users be able to maintain those walls if they choose, without a service provider choosing to collapse them and merge those identities without permission. By using their services, I did not consent to that action (in fact, repeatedly refused their attempts to do so), and if given a choice between leaving the Google-services hive and having my legal identity attached to everything I've ever written, I'd leave.

What is deceptive and duplicitous about this latest G+/YouTube action, is that many users who expressly refused the "offer" to merge accounts were merged without permission, and often those merges revealed personal information that the users had not chosen to share with YouTube.

I find that intensely disturbing, and I am seriously hoping that some type of action is taken against Google, as with Buzz, regarding the breach of private user information.

I understand how unsafe and unsettled that must make you feel, and I hope that you are able to continue enjoying YouTube without endangering and/or outing yourself. Good luck.

Thanks for pointing out that security vulnerability -- blessedly, I didn't use current legal name/address info for the website (I do my best to be cagey about that stuff online -- that's similar to, but not identical to, my actual name), but I'll have to look into obscuring the WHOIS information further. Pisses me off to have to pay for privacy, when that information shouldn't be public for private individuals who own a domain.

And, yes, I really do value my privacy -- but, since my own knowledge of trackback information is limited (and Google Image Search is much more recent than the creation of my personal site), it's less that I don't value my privacy, and more that I failed to foresee that using the same profile photo (not even name/nym) on more than one site would create a security vulnerability.

I appreciate the heads-up, but, again, this only emphasizes the issues of Google (and the issue of requiring personal information to be visible on WHOIS to anyone other than government agencies) encroaching on personal privacy and the ability to compartmentalize profiles between different services.

I'm a different person on G+, Flickr, FB, LJ, etc. -- I tailor my posts to the interest groups that I share in various locations (and my perception of my own privacy -- I realize that a subpoena would break the security of a friends-locked post on LJ, but it's at least a relatively private space to share more personal information, whereas my profile on G+ has been more deliberately forward-facing, because I was interested in engaging with people outside my existing trust circle.

Putting my real name into YouTube actually was the problem that sparked my original post -- but it's symptomatic of a larger issue, the deliberate contraction of the ability to create persistent pseudonyms and personae that are consistent within the bounds of a single social network, but aren't necessarily easily trackable/connectible by a random stranger.

(I will say -- finding this out did decrease my sense of safety, since it's obvious that my intent to compartmentalize by using different persistent nyms, and building reputation under each nym, which can vary based on platform, was insufficient to protect a casual observer from landing on what COULD have been my actual name and address, had I not deliberately decided to risk the loss of my domain by putting in information that was designed to trap spammers -- i.e., if I got something addressed to that specific name, I knew that it was coming from someone who had looked up the WHOIS info.)