Really Smart People: Real Names: Google+, Government & The Identity Ecosystem

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Real Names: Google+, Government & The Identity Ecosystem - Search Engine Watch (#SEW)

I'm grabbing a quote from the article below but not for the same reason my friend used it.

hi #pubcon #thinktank - here is the blog i thought about that nite. Read K's article first and understand i agree, with her viewpoint too.

Real Names: Google+, Government & The Identity Ecosystem - Search Engine Watch (#SEW)

So i'm quoting a friends post.. who quoted @ericschmidt ...

“In the area of social media, we knew upfront 10 years ago that the Internet lacked essentially an accurate identity service. I’m not here by the way talking about Facebook, the media gets confused when I talk about this. If you think about it, the Internet would be better if we had an accurate notion that you were a real person as opposed to a dog, or a fake person, or a spammer or what have you. - we knew about it in 1994. think AOL. circa "bad people" - had 5 identities... per account, one frequented "gold.. show..." the other "14yr old girls teen chat" , the other "forced bondage" and even worse "(female child's brand name omitted)" - ickk.. disgusting.. the account belongs to 6* yr old (no not "6", but "6*" as in somewhere between 59 and 70.) Hello, am i the only one that sees this pattern?

And the notion of strong identity was never invented in the Internet. Many people worked on it - I worked on it as a scientist 20 years ago, and it’s a hard problem. So if we knew that it was a real person, then we could sort of hold them accountable, we could check them, we could give them things, we could you know bill them, you know we could have credit cards and so forth and so on, there are all sorts of reasons. - and we watched and posted disinformation for fear that the #1 identifier was going to end up, "please enter your year of birth". or "please enter your zip code", and other easily obtainable information via a mailbox, etc.. "What are we going to do about our families being found online?"

And the Internet did not develop this in many ways because the Internet came out of universities where the issue of authentication wasn’t such a big issue. Everybody trusted everybody; you didn’t have these kinds of things. - at 12, we had access to mortgage data, DOBs, social security numbers, bank accounts, mortgage accounts, long term mortgage accounts..then it was phones, free long distance, woo hoo., we had control of entire websites for state universities tied to the university networks.. we watched traffic on routers and livingston portmasters... we knew what sites everyone were going to.. pr0n.. How are supposed to process a credit card?

But my general rule is people have a lot of free time and people on the Internet, there are people who do really really evil and wrong things on the Internet, and it would be useful if we had strong identity so we could weed them out. I’m not suggesting eliminating them, what I’m suggesting is if we knew their identitywas accurate, we could rank them. Think of them like an identity rank. - but what happens when it becomes a job?

So we’ve had all those conversations at Google but the real mechanism that helped this was the technology that was invented first by MySpace and then eventually by Facebook, where you could disambiguate names by looking at people. So if you have John Smith, they show you there’s five John Smiths, well here’s a John Smith and then based on the pictures, you say this is the John Smith who’s my friend. And that’s how identity is in fact managed in Facebook.

We were very, very slow to figure this out in my view, and I’ll take the criticism as the leader