Google Names: How a Mechanical Engineer Sees the Issue
September 3, 2011
I imagine you’ve all been acquainted with the latest social media fuss, as it is becoming old news by now. The corporate policy for Google+ requires members of its networking site to operate under real names. Users signed up under pseudonyms are finding their profiles suddenly deleted. That’s it. Now, enter public outrage stage left.
Maybe it’s too early, or because I’ve worked forty hours in three days, but despite being drawn into “Google+ Punts on Kafkaesque Name Policy” (thanks to the literary reference that ultimately falls flat) I find flaws with each side.
So, to Google. I realize you want your newest product to be as much like Facebook as possible, stopping only at donning a Mark Zuckerberg wig. You also must contend with an insatiable desire to squirrel away as much personal data as possible for future monetary gains, be it by ownership and sales or expanded search capacity. But come on, this is ridiculous. The given argument for civility in online discourse is not exclusively yours to make. Not only are you alienating your burgeoning clientele, but I don’t believe you can legally force people to use their real names in a non-government application. It is, after all, the internet.
And to would be Google+ participants. I agree with you, I really do. But if I could draw diagram to illustrate my point, it would include a fist-sized sphere representing corporations, and twelve miles away would be a single dot representing your interests. Why is this policy a surprise? Or an indignation considering your beloved Facebook’s policy is identical? Couldn’t you use any name in the friendship graveyard that was known as MySpace.com, which the masses abandoned in lieu of a more tightly controlled environment?
Coming from an individual with little to no online presence, I respect anonymity as much as the next mechanical engineer, if not more so. But I can’t even get behind bumper stickers. So I do genuinely understand the frustration of the prospective Google+ user. But I would like to gently remind readers that true personal ambiguity was ushered out with the twentieth century. Google already knows who you are and will continue to build tools that glean even more data from a largely willing public.
What I find intriguing is this most important point that largely seems to go ignored by both sides of the argument:
The biggest problem with Google’s identity policy has always been that it’s essentially unenforceable. You can’t police millions of users with algorithms looking for nonstandard characters in names or reviewing user-flagged profiles with enough sensitivity to handle edge cases without devoting an absurd number of employee hours to review every violation. By all accounts, Google hasn’t assigned such resources.
It is for this reason that perhaps the ‘activists’ feverishly working to overturn Google’s chosen identity policy should turn to more worldly causes?
Sarah Rogers, September 3, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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