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Comment by Senji | Hacker News Reader

The "identity mechanism" is actually your "Google account", gmail and the other google accounts used to be separate. But some one had the bright idea to force G+ on everyone by forcing them to merge all accounts, thus drawing audience from gmail and youtube. A really swell move.

If google wanted to they could provide oauth like identity only service.

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Google isn't just Gmail and Youtube anymore though. Maybe it was 5-10 years ago, but now there are dozens of products. Music, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Android.

All of those require an account. You're basically implying that they should have a separate account for every one of their services, which makes absolutely no sense...

Then, back when there are just two things, merging them into one was maybe not so good of a decision, but at this point, having a single account makes much more sense from a user experience point of view.

I could theoretically register a separate account for any one of those. The thing is. I should be given the option of not connecting all of those. Separation of concerns.

Perhaps it makes sense for Google to have one account system for all their services, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea for people trying to use those services to have them all linked together. It's kinda creepy, honestly, and it really makes me reluctant to use any of Google's services.

Yep, agreed; i could not have said this better myself! +1

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