Shifting the goal posts mid-play is not very nice

Dear Google,

Let me try and help you understand one of the reasons why there are people feeling very angry and disappointed with you.

It’s this stuff Eric Schmidt recently said about Google Plus being an “identity service” – you see, there may be people out there who would be happy to sign up for some kind of internet identity service, in fact I’ve heard some people speaking very positively about that idea, but the thing is, you never asked us if we wanted to, and you never warned us that this is what you were aiming for. And you definitely hadn’t brought this up when you started offering us services we could sign up for, like Gmail.

So after years of offering people various internet services which we could use with whatever names we chose, never asking for any identity verification, you come up with this great new geek toy called Google Plus and you introduce it as a social networking platform, you talk about it as a place for sharing stuff with other people, you set it up with granular privacy settings in recognition of the fact that in real life we don’t share everything with everyone, you do not at any point in the invitation or signing up process say to us: hey, by the way, this is an identity service and if you don’t comply with our names policy you may not only be thrown out of this place but also lose a whole load of other services with which we have been providing you over the years; alternatively, you may opt to comply by changing the name you’ve been using, but that may affect the name shown elsewhere, for example on Gmail, so, like Hugh Messenger’s sad story, you may find that people you’ve been corresponding with are suddenly seeing a different name altogether and left totally baffled.

Google my dear, if you want to set up an internet identity service, this is not the way to go about it – do it openly, tell people what you’re offering them, give people the choice as to whether or not they want to join, and give them the choice as to what information they want associated with it. Just as on my G+ profile you give me the option of adding whichever links I choose to different places I hang out on the internet, respecting my right to decide which parts of my multi-faceted identity I want to present there, the same principle should apply to an identity registration – and even more so, because if I sign up for something online with my real name, then I am going to want to be extremely careful about what is linked to that. I’m not just talking about the serious issues of people’s real concerns about physical harm – there is also the much more mundane stuff of employers or potential employers Googling someone’s name and seeing their frivolous banter on a social networking site or their outspoken political views on their blog. Common sense dictates that, in this day and age, with so much being searchable online, people should be careful about what they choose to connect with their real names on the internet.

Linking an identity service with a social networking platform is not the way. Just as your Circles feature recognises, people do not share the same things with their boss or with their parents as they share with their friends. When I’m hanging out on a social networking site, chatting with people about deep things or joking about cat pics or exchanging idle banter about whatever, I do not want to feel like I’m on LinkedIn – in fact, if I felt like that, I wouldn’t want to hang out there and be sociable.

The only way I can avoid feeling as though I’m on LinkedIn is by not having to disclose my surname to the whole world and not having to worry about everything I say being recorded against my full name for posterity. I’ve been enjoying G+ because I’ve been breaking your rules and not using my real name. If I were to comply with your names policy, it would take all the fun out of hanging out on G+, so I just wouldn’t bother. There already is a place where I can put on a professional face and not be myself, I don’t need another LinkedIn, thanks.

Yours very sincerely

the blogger writing as Not Celia Rogut