Hacker News Reader

Comment by Astrohacker | Hacker News Reader

I like being able to create new identities for different purposes. Why wouldn't Google+ allow that?

Eric Schmidt:

  The people who built the Internet did not get a stable
  version of identity; You need identity, in the sense that 
  you are a person, this is who you are these are your
  friends and so on … The issue on the Internet is not the
  lack of Facebook, the issue on the Internet is the lack 
  of identity.

(from http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/09/eric-schmidt-on-gauging-goo... )

Identity is not the same as "name on your birth certificate". Skud's identity is Skud, not Kirrily Roberts.

I'm all for having stable identities on social networking services, but that has nothing to do with legal names vs pseudonyms.

I agree that effective identity is about who you can become on the Internet. But there really isn't any middle ground between imposing the name on one's birth certificate and letting people create whatever identity they want - after all, every pseudonym has to begin as anonymous pseudonym and gain connections.

The G+ names policy doesn't say "name on your birth certificate". It says "the name you commonly go by in real life", see: http://www.google.com/support/+/bin/answer.py?answer=1228271

Even if Skud does go by that name in daily life, I don't see how it comes as any surprise that he is suspended pending review for that name. He even says it himself:

> I knew I was at risk of my account (under the name of “Skud .”) being suspended

The policy that they are enforcing is that you must use your legal name, leading many people to the obvious conclusion that the policy is bullshit.

> The issue on the Internet is not the lack of Facebook, the issue on the Internet is the lack of identity.

How would one use PirateBay with a real identity? Or browse porn websites? Or anonymously flirting with people in chat rooms? What's wrong with this Internet? </rhetorical questions>

Personalized search and targeted ads can be monetized very well when you have strong identity.

Besides other pragmatic business reasons, partly because in the Christian West we implicitly believe that every body has a transcendent soul, which is the "true" person, with a "true" name, and everything else is a lie. All our stuff about self-expression, being true to oneself, god sees inside when you die and are judged, Freud, etc, etc.

However, the idea of a transcendent subject may be utter bullshit -- who knows? There was a HN thread on the Japanese not having the same need for a "real" person connected consistently to an internet persona.

That philosophy, however, completely goes against the entire concept of Google+ "circles": to let you present yourself differently to one circle than you do to another.

Not really. As you say - you can behave differently to different people. That doesn't change your person - it only changes what facet of your person is obvious to others. So the "true self" concept actually is very agreeable with the "facets of me" concept.

It's also similar to the difference between "private" and "public" life - My coworkers have no particular interest or value in knowing how I bring out my trash, but the way that I do does not violate the consistency with the way that I behave at work.

There is no "person". Only context.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com