Jwz: Google's pseudonym support "obvious bullshit"
I've been using Google pretty regularly for the past 11 years, and have had a gmail account since soon after it was announced.  However with the release of Plus and the revelation of their policies on "real names", I've come to realize that I no longer trust google.<p>Gmail accounts can be effectively anonymous.  Yet plus accounts cannot be?<p>Google does not need anyone's real name in order to track and advertise to them.  I'm fine with google tracking and advertising to me.  Assign me some arbitrary UID and give me a 20 year cookie you refresh whenever I load a page with adwords or visit plus or login to gmail.  I've been fine with that, all along.<p>But requiring a real name, tells me that google doesn't just want to track me to advertise to me.  They want to correlate my online activities with my offline identity.<p>I consider that a violation of my privacy.<p>And so, I'm removing myself from google.  I'm setting up mail services elsewhere, I'm migrating my Google Apps and App Engine accounts to other services. I've stopped using Plus, and as I move things elsewhere I'm deleting them from google.<p>For me, they've gone too far, and I no longer trust them.<p>Hell, even their search results have been in steep decline lately, so DuckDuckGo, here I come!<p>PS-- I agree with jwz.  The only reason that it would take months to implement is because they're using some authoritative method - maybe ISP customer info, or government supplied info- to correlate users to reveal real identity.  I don't see this recent change as google actually relenting on the issue.