Google+ (and other social-media sites) privacy issues

A lot's been said about the privacy issues of Google+. I'd note that there's a flip side, too. Robert Heinlein pointed out that one of the best ways to lie is to tell the truth, but not all of it. Sites like Facebook and Google+ can be turned around and used to lay down the trail you want other people to find. It doesn't have to be a complete trail, just convincing. When someone goes looking, they'll find the trail you want them to find. And since they have found a trail, often they won't go looking for other trails. And if they do and you catch them at it, you have a good case for harassment against them. After all, they'll have to admit that they did find the data on you, and that it all pointed to completely uninteresting places and results, and exactly what evidence do they have that there's anything more? None.

It's a piece of advice for the Evil Overlord's Accountant: keep 4 sets of books. The first set contains records that are completely and utterly clean and prove that the Evil Overlord is a saint and completely and utterly above suspicion of even littering. The second set, which you reluctantly let investigators find if they aren't buying the first set, contains records that match up with the totals for the first set but have some transactions that, while they appear illegal at first glance, turn out upon further investigation to be merely shady and embarrassing but completely legal. Any investigators will probably have stirred up some trouble with their efforts to uncover this second set, and after getting all excited about their initial findings will likely have egg on their faces after it all turned into duds on them, and their superiors will be more than happy to just drop the investigation before they're embarrassed any further.

Apply this tactic with social networks. If you have things to hide, set things up so you're easy to find and lay down a nice innocuous trail using those profiles. Then quietly do anything you don't want people finding out about under alternate identities that don't have any connection to your public profile. After all, it's easy on even Google+ to set up a profile under a fictitious name, as long as the name itself doesn't draw attention and you're discrete about what information you fill in. Just remember that these sites record IP addresses, so use some form of proxy to avoid linking profiles by "they're accessed from the same computer".

Google+ real-name issue

I can see the arguments on both sides, and they aren't mutually incompatible.

People want to be anonymous. They want to eg. criticize corporations and governments without necessarily opening themselves up to having government agents showing up at their workplace, or corporate lawyers contacting their employer. More innocuously, they want to have a private side of their life that isn't mixed up with their work and professional life.

Other people want continuity of identity. They want to know that when a given name speaks it's the same person, and that a single person can't trivially have a multitude of identities and turn themselves into a virtual crowd that can drown everyone else out or create the illusion of popular support for a position that lacks such support.

Google wants things tied to a single identity, so they can link activities to individual users in a coherent manner. They want to know what your search history is so they can correctly determine what's popular and what's not.

This can in large part be done by disconnecting your profile from your account. Your account gets verified, making it possible but non-trivial to create multiple accounts. Only Google gets to see your account. You can then create one or more profiles linked to that account. The profile can have any name you want, any other information you want, and the information doesn't need to match from profile to profile. They all tie back to the account so Google can audit and track things, but that link's invisible to the public. If someone thinks you're creating sock-puppet profiles, they can file a complaint and Google can verify whether the profiles are all linked to the same account or not without needing to let the world see the link. People can be assured that a given profile belongs to the same person over time, and a name can build up a reputation without people needing to know the exact person behind the name. The profile's identified by a unique identifier like a profile ID, not by the name, so you can see if a different profile's trying to masquerade as an established name. Most everybody's requirements are met.

The problem comes with anonymity. That depends entirely on Google's willingness (and legal ability) to say to someone showing up demanding the account information behind a profile "Do you have a court order? No? Then come back when you have one.". And that in turn depends on a more basic legal/political issue: requiring someone to show that the person behind the identity has in fact done something actionable before being allowed to demand their identity so legal action can commence. To me that sounds reasonable, and in fact the law technically requires charges to be supported before they can even be filed, but in practice the courts seem reluctant to tell a plaintiff or prosecutor "You haven't supported your charges. Go away until you can.". That's a political problem, one that needs addressed by pressuring the politicians to state explicitly that plaintiffs and prosecutors aren't allowed to file charges or commence legal action without solid evidence to support the claims already being on the table. Until that happens there's no way to both allow anonymity and be able to hold bad actors responsible for their actions, and you can't have a civilized environment without both of those.