What happens when social surveillance goes mainstream? — Tech News and Analysis.
If you share everything on your social networks on “public” settings, you are just asking for trouble. Cut everything back to “friends only” and prune those you don’t actually know and trust from your friends list. Turn off “friends of friends’ capability as well. If you don’t know how to use Groups on FB or Circles on G+, learn.
The Cloud Makes it: “The 4 A’s of Authentication”… | SecureAuth Blog.
Good stuff from Craig, Garrett and the entire gang over at SecureAuth.
Google+, developers hope to revolutionize video chat with new ‘Hangouts’ apps – SiliconValley.com.
Well the numbers don’t lie about Facebook’s headstart over Google Pluss:
845 million vs. 100 million users
7 hours / month vs. 3 minutes / month
I guess me and my family are the outlyers as we almost exclusively use Google Plus having mostly abandoned Facebook. I do several Hangouts a week with family members. We post to our Family circle multiple times per day which is significantly more than we ever did on Facebook. Now, none of us really ever gamed on Facebook and I’m not aware of anyone gaming on Google Plus, though my brother in law and I have begun playing Zombie Lane.
I know for me, I switched to Google Plus as I prefer the simplicity and cleanliness of the UI as well as for the simplicity and control of Circles. I now am able to have a single Google Plus account and keep my various “selves” separate. With Facebook, I had 3 different accounts (so much for the real name requirement) to keep my personal life, my professional / public life and my online gaming life seprate. I know FB added Groups, but it was late with this hideously obvious feature. Also Groups feels very tacked on. For instance, when I go to share something on FB, I don’t have a choice as to what Group(s) should see it.
Perhaps my family being all Android users has something to do with it. G+ ties in nicely to everything else we’re doing on our phones. I take pictures and they automatically upload to Photos where I can simply share them or not. Bouncing back and forth between posts on G+ and more private email replies is a no-brainer. Contacts, Latitude check-ins, etc. all correlate nicely and just works without having to think about “what app am I in?”, “I should switch to the FB app and share this”, etc.
Another minor gripe I have about FB is that it won’t hold the sort I want; Recent. It really wants me to be on Top Stories. I have to change this almost every time I visit.
Just one man’s experience along with his major circle of contacts, his family. I think the rumors of G+’s death are hideously exaggerated. Whatever you prefer though, can’t argue against having choices, eh?
Another good reason to have multiple FB or other social-network-of-your-choice accounts. Sure have one with your real name so those long lost friends can find you, but for heaven’s sake don’t post anything interesting there. Use your alternate pseudonym account for that.
In this particular case, an employer asking for one may well ask for the other if they’ve done enough homework to know you have multiple accounts. However, many won’t think of such a thing. This gives you the option to comply by giving them access to a completely innocent location that won’t do you any harm. For me, if an employer demanded this as a term of employment, I’d know it was no place I’d want to work and we’d part ways.
Another thing to think about is if you are perusing your social networks on your employer’s network and hardware, are you being careful enough in your security practices to know they don’t have your password? Another good reason to establish and maintain a pseudonym along with using the most stringent authentication such sites make available.
Interesting that the title says one thing and the author, Liz, then goes on to explain exactly why you want a unified identity. Anyone living a digital life even remotely close to that of Liz understands at least intuitively why you want a unified online identity. I’d love to have all the best of breed services work together too, but I’m not going to lay that at Google’s feet anymore than I’d lay it at Apple’s feet. I’d argue that at least Google provides more connectivity outside their low-walled garden than Apple does in their razor-wire lined garden wall.
Some things do a better job at integrating to other things. Big shock. Ask your IT department if this is a problem they have in a world with a longer history of pursuing supposed standards and interoperability. They’ll probably guffaw.
Google doesn’t have anymore explaining than Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc., etc. The fact they come to mind may be because they are in fact the furthest along in actually delivering the most compelling unifying experience.
I’ve installed this to compare with another Chrome extension I’ve been running with for about a month: Do Not Track Plus. I’m pretty happy with this tool as it allows for micro-overriding on pages where you want the linkage back to G+ or FB to work for spot usage, but leaving tracking off in general.
» Your actual wallet vs./+ Google’s and Apple’s ProjectVRM.
More good stuff from Doc, as usual. Posting this mostly for my own uses to follow through on the voluminous links included in this article.
Research Reveals Consumer Perceptions of Online Registration | Janrain.
88% give incomplete / incorrect information. I’m encouraged that this number is this high. I’d be more impressed if the question was “always give inaccurate information”, but I’m glad to see that the main stream user is apparently understanding they don’t owe marketers anything beyond purchasing the product or service they are there for.
If I don’t have to register somewhere, I don’t. If I do, they get my Ghurney Hahleq identity information which shares no information with my real life. The email address is spam@hahleq.c()m so that all communications from them hit a gmail label / folder that I can review if I wish and completely miss out on all the “follow-up”, “value add” marketing drivel.
Even though I am neck deep in the IT world and digital life, I have been and always will be a marketers nightmare. If I want something I’ll go find it myself. Till then, “don’t email me, I’ll search you”.
This is a bit of a follow-up to my earlier post “Google+ Primarily an Identity Service?” though these posts elevate the topic to a more serious level that I did in that post, which was purely from a simple end-user perspective. From a professional, where’s-online-identity-going standpoint, this is a very interesting touchpoint and Doc Searls puts it in great historical and technological perspective in his post, Circling Around Your Wallet. The ultimate online battle for the ultimate killer app is… you. This means your identity in whatever guise identity ends up being defined as, which means who defines it matters. Hailstorm / Passport from Microsoft was dead on launch because no one wanted to trust such a definition and resultant architecture to come from MS. As I finished up my last post on this topic, it comes down to trust.
Do we trust Google to get this definition and resultant architecture right? Just because they have the self-aggrandizing motto “do no harm”, that just isn’t possible once you get to where they and a few others have gotten, where a lot of what you do will inevitably harm some community. Clearly, there are use cases where using a real name will be actually, dangerous to you in the real world. Google, by taking this stand indicates, “accept risk or get lost”. Certainly, their product, their right.
However, do we trust Google, or any other entity to be in a position to enforce their idea of accountability? Hear Eric Schmidt’s own words:
“If we knew that it was a real person, then we could sort of hold them accountable, we could check them, we could give them things, we could you know bill them, you know we could have credit cards and so forth and so on.”
“There are people who do really really evil and wrong things on the Internet, and it would be useful if we had strong identity so we could weed them out.”
Meg Worley in her post, say no to the meat wallet rightly calls out the word “accountability” as “one of the darkest words in the English language”. Combine accountable with “we could weed them out” and you don’t have to be too big a conspiracy theorist to get a bit of a shiver down your spine. Apparently, Google has decided with their real names policy has decided to preemptively weed out those that don’t fit the definition of “you” they see as best commoditized in their business model.
To many, this all sounds like a lot of furor over nothing and trying over-intellectualize the issue, but there is a lot at stake here. Bonnie Nadri does a good job highlighting the real practical issues we should all be thinking about now.
Only the players have changed since the early 2000′s when MS made their bid. Now its Google and Facebook and others. The real point is that one of the players hasn’t changed and isn’t going to change and that’s YOU. Yep, the you that does and should define you in the real world and the virtual and anywhere they intersect.
The Google+ Identity Service Project – Search Engine Watch #SEW.
I’ve seen the quote from Eric Schmidt all over the place and I can’t take any issue with Eric’s stated intentions and motivations, as they are whatever he says they are and I’m happy to believe him. However, I can certainly chuckle about the reality. It is exactly the same chuckle I had about the supposed user community kerfuffle around the “real name” related banning.
What kind of name could you put up that would get noticed and banned? If you are John Smith and don’t want to go by John Smith, then pick something else that looks even remotely reasonable. Kiqnaz Taiknaims? Sounds good. I just registered that at Gmail and invited Kiqnaz to G+ from one of my 4 G+ accounts. It will be interesting to see if Google ever flags that “identity” as un-”real”.
Yes, you read that right, I have 4 G+ accounts and while I do have one in my real name, I don’t post there and don’t foresee really ever doing so. I post under the same name I’ve used on the internet for over a decade. There are people that only know me as Hahleq, so why shouldn’t it be considered a “real name”? I have used it a lot and for a long time such that online it has as much or more reputation as my “real name”. What the reputation is of course, is up for others to decide and therein lies the point I’m getting to much slower and more painfully than I’d like.
Your identity is not your username, real name or not. Your identity isn’t your username and password. Your identity is a combination of the following: an identifier (username, screen name, email address, etc.) and data linked to that identifier. This data comes in many forms.
The data at the end of the day however always comes down to trust. Do you trust that your company controls issuing email addresses? Do you trust that ebay and Amazon police their communities and prevent reputation inflation cheats? Do you trust that the John Smith on Google+ ostensibly living in your hometown is the John Smith you went to high school with? If so, what data did it take to earn your trust? If you run across a blog written by Mr. Kiqnaz Taiknaims and find the content valuable will you really care if that is his real name? If he buys your used tablet on eBay and the payment clears will you care?
Exactly.