Sunday, August 28, 2011

CNN Interview Reveals More From Eric Schmidt on Google+ as an Identity Service


". . . I think it's pretty clear that the Internet as a whole has not had a strong notion of identity, and identity means, "who am I". So we spend an awful lot to of time trying to guess who you are. Plus it's easy to have impostors, people can spam, and so forth and so on. Facebook has done a good job of building a way of disambiguating names. So if you use Facebook, if you have John Smith and you try to pick which one, you look at the pictures of their friends and that's how you disambiguate it. But fundamentally what Facebook has done is build a way to figure out who people are. That system is missing in the Internet as a whole. Google should have worked on this earlier. We now have a product called Google+ which has been in developments for more than a more than your half which is a partial answer to that." Google Executive Director, Eric Schmidt

8 comments:

Dirk said...

I think it rather disingenuous of them to introduce this as "yet another google feature" without warning people of the dramatic nature of the change that they were introducing. If they had simply started, in a completely straightforward manner, saying that this is their answer to Msft Passport or something equally open and obvious, they could have avoided this massive divide with the tech community. Personally, I don't want to use it as that. I don't want an online service like Passport. I do want an online service like Google+ which is for social media and keeping up with my friends as I know them to be.

badweather said...

No Doubt,

then add in the stripping of photo's and maybe even losing other data as they shut your google+ account down.

I'm very soured on Google these days. Anonymity is just as critical for political organizers in America as it is in Egypt or Brazil

Anonymous said...

Please help me by reading my appeal on my profile

Yordie Sands said...

I'm in the camp that thinks Google has headed down a path that threatens people who use anonymnity, regardless of whether or not those people are a threat to the values they wish to protect.

I'm also feeling threatened because I use my nym to protect me from stalkers. I have been a victim of internet stalking by people using Google search. Fortunately, I was able to use Google to identify my staker. And so it goes.

I do not like Mr. Schmidt's smug attitude, his righteousness in all of this. I hope he expands his research and realizes he should include provisions for protecting the security of people who feel they need the protection of nyms.

These are frightening times.

Danielle said...

I guess this is an opening for fake ID services. Time to fire up Photoshop ...

sororNishi said...

When did Disambiguate become a verb?...same week as Ambiguate?

Net Antwerp said...

Well, there you have it!

Even Eric Schmidt admits that Google+ is an 'identity service', which should mean that legit on-line personas and identities like Net Antwerp and Botgirl Questi be allowed to use the service.

Pseudonyms (established legitimate identity) are different from anonymous (collective, hive). Google needs to respect that, and go after people with throwaway anonymous usernames - names that can't be recognized anywhere.

Joey1058 said...

The really sad, scary issue over this, and Botgirl hit the nail on the head with the "frog in the water" anaology, is that we were so busy trying to get into the nice room-temp water, now it's boiling, and Google has us nice and cooked just the way they want us.

Search, Gmail, Picasa, Chrome, Buzz, Reader, Blogger, YouTube, Android, and now Plus. The issue with real names happens to be an afterthought, that they don't need to worry about whether anyone likes it or not. Real names just makes the job easier. They know who we are already.

There really is no escape. There really is no such thing as "don't be evil".