Comment by 6d0debc071 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 6d0debc071 | Hacker News Reader

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> Google used to have a separate profile system just like profiles.yahoo.com, and like Yahoo, having lots of disparate services with weak unification was a problem.

No, it wasn't. It was very simple. You want an account for youtube, sign up on youtube, you want an account for something else - sign up there. You want your accounts to be the same login across all the services? Use the same login across all the services.

It wasn't confusing, it wasn't complex, it didn't present any problems to anyone of even moderate intelligence.

> Is it really beyond the pale for a service to prompt you to enter some optional information about yourself?

It's not really optional when they start tying everything together. I don't want my real name tied to any of my online activities - but if my google accounts were stuck together through google+ it would be, because I use my real name on my phone.

It's possible to lie of course, and tell a different lie with a different email address for every time you want to limit the degree to which different portions of your data contaminate other things. But it's a pain in the arse and only realistically possible because they're not enforcing their single sign on policy that strongly yet.

They're made it far more complicated to keep your privacy than it was before.

Having to create a separate account on N services with the same credentials is simpler than having a unified account? And what if your login is already taken on one of the other services, now you're forced to have multiple credentials. And then when you need to update something, like change an email address, 2factor authentication, or some other feature, you've now got to edit settings on many services.

If you want an anonymous Google account, simply create one, which is what everyone has been doing for a long time, even for gmail prior to G+, people would create multiple accounts.

The model isn't K identities and N services, you need O(K*N) credentials in the worse case. It's K identities and N services is O(K) credentials.

> If you want an anonymous Google account, simply create one

I did. I had to sign up with a "backup" email address though, for which I entered my primary email address. Now, whenever Gmail users send an email to my primary email address, they see the bogus name that I created the anonymous Google account with. Crap.

And Youtube, please stop asking me to use my "real" name. Is it that hard to remember my preferences?

> Having to create a separate account on N services with the same credentials is simpler than having a unified account?

I said it wasn't complicated, that's not the same thing as saying it's simpler.

What's simpler is going to depend to a high degree on your use of the system.

For instance, I do some work with disadvantaged people - charity/volunteer stuff - and some of the people who haven't touched a computer before cannot understand that the government won't be able to track them through their Universal Jobmatch accounts if they use other websites that don't use that sign on. For them, it probably is simpler to have one log on.

Taking myself as another example though, I'm obviously going to find it more complicated to manage alternate identities, that have to at least passingly sound real, to ensure my privacy than I did just not having my real name online at all and reusing some of the assorted user-names I used on other sites while using different email addresses to stop it all getting tied together.

It's a trade off - at least from a user perspective - what are you optimising for?

As I see it, you gain some small ease of understanding for people who have just never used a computer before, (and increase the penalty when they mess up and leave themselves signed in on a public computer, which they do .) And you get some small benefit if you want to change your email address across all the service (though how often does that happen - and how many services do you really use?) However, you make it more difficult for people to remain anonymous.

There's also the fact that a similar thing could have been done without tying everything through G+. Which of course they're not going to do because they want to force you to use it.

We're talking about marginal gains, in return for making things much harder for those of us who don't want our names floating about associated with all we do.

(That and I question whether it's a good idea to make people have one sign in for so many things anyway. Nanny-state-me is like 'That's a terrible idea, the only thing worse than a crap password is the same crap password for everything.' )

It's somewhat worse than just KN, because if you have say, an iOS or Android tablet, then you'll have apps for YouTube, Gmail, Maps, Talk, Picassa, Drive, etc If you had to sign in to every once of those mobile apps the number of devices you own, it would be very very irritating.

As it is now, you add your account to your Android phone, or Chrome single-sign-on and you're done.

Um, password re-use is well-known to be a Bad Thing, especially if you're using the same password for gmail as for some seedy site you were curious about. It increases your security attack surface.

The all eggs in one basket approach exposes you to equal risks online, the minute that account's compromised they've got everything, and worse risks in the case that you leave yourself logged in somewhere.

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