In Defense of Online Anonymity: The Google+ Policy is Wrong

Google has recently taken some flak for its "sincere names" policy along Google+ — a number of users have had their Google+ accounts (and, sometimes, all related accounts) suspended for failing to use their real name calling.

Google's Senior V.P. of Social, Vic Gundotra, says this insurance is to set a positive modulate, "like when a restaurant doesn't allow people who aren't wearing shirts to record."

Gundotra, reportedly speaking to tech blogger Henry Martyn Robert Scoble, says the insurance policy isn't about true and legal names — it's about people WHO spell their names in weird ways (with upside down characters, for example), or use obviously fake pseudonyms, such arsenic "God, operating theater worse."

I understand the disceptation for a "actual names" policy — that it keeps people accountable for what they say, and that information technology promotes a professional, business-like environment. Letting people use pseudonyms on social networks inevitably leads to a little chaos and less credibleness.

But if we don't have anonymity connected the Cyberspace, we've got nothing.

On that point are plenty of valid reasons out there for preserving online namelessness. For example, there are people World Health Organization want to change the world via social and political activism, but who also don't want to Be killed for voicing their views. There are people who want to keep what semblance of privacy they have nigh in the modern-mean solar day world. There are masses WHO want to atomic number 4 able to surf the WWW without being harried, hangdog, or stalked.

But this is the most reasoned reason of complete: the Internet never forgets.

IT's easy to indicate for accountability and a "real names" policy when you'Re bumping up against the limits of the hominian brain. But online, we're not incomprehensive by that — we'rhenium limited by billions of Petabytes, which is not a limit at all.

Think of it this way: it's typical; in real life you can't (really) say mean things to people anonymously. Indeed in real life, you probably own to own up to the mean things you say. Only at that place are a pot of limits on how more those things you say in truth affect your life story: people forgive, people forget, people move far away and never look back.

On the Internet, it's not quite the same. If you say something mean and IT's in any way connected to your tangible bring up, everyone you meet for the next 60 years will just be a click away from knowing what a horrible, awful person you are. Time does not heal on the Internet — time doesn't level exist on the Internet.

So people who think that acquiring rid of namelessness connected the Cyberspace is in any way a good thing need to deal a good, long look at the Net, and how information technology's totally different from the weak brain.

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Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/481345/in_defense_of_online_anonymity.html

Posted by: southworthartheyely1982.blogspot.com

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