Livre d'Or

All good points. I am somewhat circumspect here; I try to keep it so that if someone did connect my blog to my offline life, it might be annoying but not disastrous. And I use the ability to lock posts if something is borderline. But I'm lucky that that standard is broad enough to allow most stuff I want to talk about. I don't honestly have the energy to keep track of multiple, rigidly separated identities. But if there were a pressing need I would have to find a way, and Google+ forbidding that is really uncool, in my book.

And yeah, it is more of a problem that it's Google than some fly-by-night internet start-up. Google already knows everything about me! Plus their main interests are search, which means automated, efficient ways for other people to delve into this huge pile of data, and advertising, which means they may well sell information to advertisers.

When they started Gmail they had a huge image problem because people feared that their emails would become searchable, or that someone was reading their private correspondence in order to serve them relevant (too relevant!) adverts. They handled that one really well. But now they have a genuine problem because they've fucked up on privacy issues several times in recent memory. And with the drive to link everything up, under one readily recognizable name, they're effectively broadcasting a lot of stuff that people used to assume was reasonably private even if not secret. Your activity on YouTube, your search history, and at this point, especially after Buzz, I'm not even sure that your email is safe. This is why I'm hoping that Google gets hit (again) with a big Data Protection stick, because they just have way too much power over people's lives to get away with bad practice.