[Image: The Nonsense Blog]
Identity, or rather the ability to create new identities, is a key facet of the internet. Some people troll away on internet forums under assumed names just to cause trouble, while others use made up identities to expose political scandal or even circumvent local laws. This ability to change identity at will is both a boon to the creative and a bane to the legislative, but in its own way it drives innovation and change.
Identity And Social Media
Eric Schmidt of Google spoke recently at the Edinburgh International Television Festival to announce the launch of Google Television in Europe, which should hit our shores in the new year. However, he also took some questions, including one from Andy Carvin about Google Plus (G+). He asked “how Google justifies the policy [of making people use their real name] given that real identities could put people at risk?”
Schmidt’s answer was that G+ was built primarily an identity service, and that people were free not to use it if they felt they could be putting themselves at risk. I found the answer a little disappointing, especially given the tone of his actual speech which took issue with the ongoing split between the sciences and the arts in the UK.
By forcing G+ users to use their real identities Google are in effect silencing the weird and the creative along with the subversive and the disruptive, leaving them to create their “fake” identities on message boards and Twitter and Facebook instead. Google’s attitude appears to be driven by their desire to use G+ data as part of their search results algorithm as a way of reducing web spam, but this seems like a short sighted method of guaranteeing the authenticity of a +1 click for instance.
Authentication vs Identity
Rather than focus purely on identity I think Facebook and Twitter are getting it right by focusing on authentication. By verifying that you are the person who created a certain Facebook or Twitter account you can continue that internet persona uninterrupted on a myriad of different sites. You could potentially Like things more than once, or share them on multiple Twitter accounts, but does that really cause a problem when a real person does it once or twice?
Say you could have more than one G+ account then, how many people would go to go to the trouble of creating two accounts to game Google’s search results? A lot unfortunately. There’s real money riding on it after all, and knowing the experience of Black Hat SEO practitioners and their “creative” ways of building links, they’ve probably already gotten around Google’s current protections anyway.
Google really are going to be fighting an uphill battle to keep it to one account per person. Twitter suffers a great deal from fake accounts being set up for spam purposes. Facebook apparently less so, even though Facebook Likes are now almost a web currency of their own. But companies with people as smart as the ones at Google, Facebook and Twitter should be able to decouple the ideas of multiple (valid) identities and spambots created purely to manipulate results.
Who Are You Right Now?
I think Fred Wilson’s take on Identity and Authentication is pretty spot on too. He comes at it from a slightly different angle, not so much about fake or hidden identities but rather about his real identity being split across different sites for different reasons. It was for exactly this reason that G+ made the leap forward it did with Circles, letting people split out who they talk to based on some common themes, but by tying it all to your real name it restricts itself unnecessarily.
Quinton O’Reilly also recently covered some of the problems that arise from having a publicly accessible profile with its own unique persona, especially when potential employers come looking to dig up some dirt on you. To me that’s all the more reason why people should be allowed to have different accounts, or identities if they want to. In fact, it’s almost exactly the reason that most people I know on LinkedIn are members of that site. They don’t want their Facebook profiles perused by employers, colleagues or customers!
Should Businesses Care?
Which brings me to the business end of things. Most people who use WhatClinic.com use their real names when they create an enquiry and they use real email addresses and real phone numbers. But do we know if they just created that email account, or just bought a prepaid mobile phone? No. Do we know if they’re using a pseudonym? No. Should we care? Not really. So long as the clinic can actually contact the user they’re free to call themselves whatever they want.
People change depending on the situation they’re in. They do it in the real world and they do it online, and I doubt even Google are going to be able to stop that.
Most Recent Comments