Thoughts & worries about Google's new privacy policy*

[capri0mni]

Translation: What's privacy?

[cross posted from a comment in trouble's journal]:

I'm not sure I read right the first time (and I don't have the spoons to reread, today ['cause virus X]), but there's this thing about changing all user names on Google's Services to Google's standard (I.E. Birth Certificate name)? Supposedly to make it easier for people to know who you are?

"Blogger" (where I have Plato's Nightmare) and YouTube (Where I have a channel) are Google-based, and I'm CapriUni on both. For my own consistency, to make it easier for friends throughout cyberspace to recognize me, I decided 11 years ago, to use CapriUni as my online "face". If Google automatically switches my username on their services, it would actually make it harder for actual people to know who I am, 'cause it would be inconsistent.

Comments

[pebblerocker]

Is there any way to NOT be signed in to Youtube while watching videos? I can tell it to log me out, but then I have to log back in to get my email and it's signed me back into Youtube (under my RL name) next time I go back. Ugh.

[capri0mni]

I may not be understanding your question, but:

You can watch videos when you're logged out, but you need to be logged into your YouTube account to comment, like, upload your own videos. And maybe share, too. Haven't tried that while logged out.

[pebblerocker]

Sorry, I didn't make much sense there. I don't have a Youtube account at all and always used to watch videos without a login (comments there are a cesspool I don't want to dive into), but recently I started getting logged into Youtube with my Gmail account -- the one with my RL name, the address I use with family etc -- automatically every time I visited. I can't seem to tell it that I want to log in and read my email but not log into Youtube at the same time.

Google used to have a principle "Don't be evil". They must have thrown that one out a while ago, buying up the whole internet and making us use RL names everywhere.

[smw]

I'm not sure I understand the mindset behind such policies. So far as I can interpret it, it seems based in the idea that a legal name makes someone more real than a chosen one. Which... not so much. I mean, the nature of my interaction with you is the same whether I think of you as "CapriUni" or "Ann Surname".

[capri0mni]

Well, it makes a big difference if the people they're actually interested in providing services to are merchants and advertisers, because it's only with our legal names that we purchase things.

[capri0mni]

Yeah. I don't have Gmail.

But yeah, I think if you log into one Google account, you're logged into others automatically. I know I'm logged into YouTube when I logged into Blogger.

I haven't bothered poking around...

[smw]

... oh. And now it makes sense! Go go obliviousness.

[capri0mni]

ayup. Which is why the really simple version of their new policy is:

Products for sale don't have any privacy.

So much for "don't be evil."

[jesse_the_k]

Again a winner with the brevity.

There's one point I'll give Google right now: they are absolutely making sure we know about the privacy policy changing. I'm hoping that clever Internet wonders who are not me are boiling down the new policy and we'll all be Tweeted the link sometime soon.

[capri0mni]

Okay. Yes. That's a point in favor of Google.

Although...

I remember coming across a tidbit of pop psychology years ago that the Subconscious Mind (that mind which drives our actions and beliefs) simply does not perceive negative formations of language -- because "not" and "zero" and "none" are, by definition, abstractions rather than concrete things that can be felt or seen, or heard.

For example: read the following sentence:

There is no purple giraffe at the zoo.

What's the first thing that pops into your mind? Taking a wild stab, I'll bet it was some form of purple giraffe.

So maybe we should have all seen this coming, back when Google chose "Don't be evil" as a corporate motto, instead of: "Be Good."