I've found this whole argument strange from both sides, but I couldn't quite put a finger on why until now. You reminded me:
> I thought Google understood Privacy when they built Google Plus
G+ has this thing called "circles." It was all very hyped-up when it came out. It allows different groups of people to see different facets of you, and basically treat you as the subset of "you" that you want each group to see.
Now, the argument we've all been having, is that different groups of people call you by different names. Your family likely call you by your "real" (birth certificate) name. Your friends might call you something else. Strangers—and if you're an online celebrity, you know a lot of them—know you by yet a third name. See what this is suggesting?
Your name should be a property of a circle, not of your identity. In fact, almost all your attributes should be circle-attached, rather than profile-attached. Remember the spat about people who wanted to not share their gender online? What if you could be genderless to most folks, male to business contacts, and a female-to-male transsexual to friends?
(Of course, it gets a bit more complicated for the people you've put in multiple circles when you share something with both of those groups—I imagine there should then be a "circle precedence order" where metadata from circle X overrides metadata from circle Y when both are available. But sheesh, these are problems Google engineers should be eating for breakfast.)
Your "public" persona, then, is just metadata attached to the lowest-precedence, virtual "universe of discourse" circle that encircles everyone you don't actually have any relationship with. Your personal settings for what G+ should refer to you as are just the metadata of a highest-precedence circle that just contains you. And so on.
I love this idea, I can even see an interface where the circles can be overlapping, making it obvious that only people in the "innermost" circle can call me "Marty" or see pictures of my Hello Kitty coffee mug.
I designed a social network in my head some months ago (who didn't, to be honest) and the way I handled the issue was having per-circle (yeah, I even called them circles..) profiles. I still want that, in particular I want a different profile photo for public viewing.
> I thought Google understood Privacy when they built Google Plus
G+ has this thing called "circles." It was all very hyped-up when it came out. It allows different groups of people to see different facets of you, and basically treat you as the subset of "you" that you want each group to see.
Now, the argument we've all been having, is that different groups of people call you by different names. Your family likely call you by your "real" (birth certificate) name. Your friends might call you something else. Strangers—and if you're an online celebrity, you know a lot of them—know you by yet a third name. See what this is suggesting?
Your name should be a property of a circle, not of your identity. In fact, almost all your attributes should be circle-attached, rather than profile-attached. Remember the spat about people who wanted to not share their gender online? What if you could be genderless to most folks, male to business contacts, and a female-to-male transsexual to friends?
(Of course, it gets a bit more complicated for the people you've put in multiple circles when you share something with both of those groups—I imagine there should then be a "circle precedence order" where metadata from circle X overrides metadata from circle Y when both are available. But sheesh, these are problems Google engineers should be eating for breakfast.)
Your "public" persona, then, is just metadata attached to the lowest-precedence, virtual "universe of discourse" circle that encircles everyone you don't actually have any relationship with. Your personal settings for what G+ should refer to you as are just the metadata of a highest-precedence circle that just contains you. And so on.