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.
