Eric Schmidt offers candid thoughts on Google Plus
Google Plus has photo albums, "friendships" (in the form of Circles), and even games, but Google's former CEO says that people should think of G+ as an "identity service" not as a social network.
During a festival in Edinburgh last week, NPR reporter Andy Carvin asked Eric Schmidt about Google's sometimes-controversial insistence that people sign up for the service using their real names (rather than using an online pseudonym, which is the preferred practice of many Internet inhabitants who don't necessarily want their online activity tied to their offworld identities). Carvin recounted Schmidt's response (appropriately) on his Google Plus page:
He replied by saying that G+ was build [sic] primarily as an identity service, so fundamentally, it depends on people using their real names if they're going to build future products that leverage that information.
Regarding people who are concerned about their safety, he said G+ is completely optional. No one is forcing you to use it...
He also said the internet would be better if we knew you were a real person rather than a dog or a fake person. Some people are just evil and we should be able to ID them and rank them downward.
These aren't exact quotes, but I did my best to paraphrase the gist of what he was saying.
via Andy Carvin - Google+ - I'm at the Edinburgh Intl TV Festival and just got to ask a….
Earlier this year, I attended an event at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce about the White House's proposed "National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace" -- a plan with DHS and Commerce Department support that would make the Internet a more secure place to do business. Essentially, the White House thinks the Web is woefully insecure and that there needs to be a better way to verify that people are who they say they are, in order to prevent fraud, data breaches, and mean Craigslist pranks. This was months before Plus came on the scene, but Google had representatives at the event who talked about what the company was doing to enhance identity authentication in Gmail and other Google products.
Government officials have made clear that they want the push for identity authentication to come from private industry, as BigGov is wary of the backlash if they were to start issuing digital driver's licenses for navigating the Internet. Google seems to be well aware of the opportunity here to become the service that people use as their passport online. Eric Schmidt's comments suggest that Plus is a part of their plan to fill that need.
That's a big responsibility. And it means that the company has to be extra wary of fake accounts popping up on its service, such as the fake Paul Krugman account that got so much attention in politico circles last week. Given Google's insistence that people use their real names, people will start assuming that accounts on Plus are real. (Whoever was behind that fake Krugman account, I hope you don't live in California. You can be charged with a misdemeanor there for creating fake profiles.)
Those who are still pushing back against Google's "real name policy" are probably pushing in vain. Google is not showing any signs of rethinking it, and in fact, has talked about taking 'real identity' online to a new level. One Google+ team member has said that everyone on Plus -- not just celebrities -- will eventually get "verification badges" for their pages. Google doesn't just want Plus to be Facebook; it wants it to be the Digital DMV.
