Maybe It’s Not Just For Tech Nerds. Or Maybe I Am One.

Last Wednesday night at about 2am when no self-respecting working person should by rights be awake, I checked my email and found an invitation to Google+. I whooped so loud I think I woke my roommate up.

I am excited about Google+. For all that it is a baby beta product still under development, still hiccuping its way to adulthood, it seems to be answering a fundamental need in my online life. (And I’m not alone.)

I deleted my Facebook account last March. Most of the people reading this blog know that I’m not on Facebook, and a few probably know why, though I try to keep a lid on the rampant ranting when the person I’m talking to was honestly just trying to invite me to a barbecue, or find a easy way to get in touch with me. (My response to people trying to find me is usually that I’m incredibly Google-able. There are advantages to having and using unique middle names.)

So here it is, in a nutshell: my opinion of Facebook is founded upon the basic premise that Facebook is evil. My opinion of Google is founded upon the basic premise that Google is not.

I realize these are vast generalizations based upon a number of assumptions and in many cases a willingness to ignore inherent systemic issues. Of course we can’t summarize the whole of a company’s existence along a Dungeons & Dragons-esque scale of alignment. Facebook (Lawful Evil) is facing a potential $100B (yes, that’s a b, as in billions of dollars) IPO early next year, and Google (Neutral Good) is a Fortune 100 company (#92 right now, in case you’re interested). It’s not like this shit ain’t complicated. And it’s not like Google always gets it right.

But hey, I’m not a technologist. I pay only vague attention to the market and I really don’t have the legal chops to go toe to toe on privacy laws. Originally I wasn’t even going to write this post, but a friend convinced me otherwise, saying that sometimes maybe non-tech-nerd people should talk about techy things.

So, a story.

In the winter of 2009 to the spring of 2010, I was in the midst of a complicated project to try and get a handle on my online identity. I was coming off two years as an active anonymous blogger, and a third, much harder year as an outed one. I was paying a lot more attention than usual to the nuances of crafting an online image, and to the ways in which I could be identified.

Then a few Facebook-related things happened all at once.

A lot of people in the New York scene started joining Facebook, and friending me, under their scene names. I’m not sure why it happened just then; I assume it was a quirk of my social graphs, though it also might have been linked to the just-then-emerging consciousness of Facebook as a branding platform. Anyway.

The issue, as I saw it, was that by accepting the friend request of someone using a pseudonym, I automatically gave them access to the real names and real information of my friends, many of whom shared the same scene. I couldn’t figure out a way to prevent this, so I stopped accepting friend requests from people in the scene.

Then, Facebook took my previously private profile and made every single item on it searchable and public. If you had a private profile then, you might remember this; it was a part of a change in their terms of service. Struggling to find a way to make my information private again, I eventually gave up and just deleted all of the fields, leaving my profile blank.

Shortly thereafter, Mark Zuckerberg gave this ridiculous interview, in which, to paraphrase, he said that privacy was no longer a social norm and that people want to share their information openly. At which I distinctly remember yelling at my screen in fury. Of course privacy won’t be a social norm if you make it impossible to keep things private!

Finally, I tried to figure out how to delete my Facebook account. And, stunned by the incredibly complicated hoops and jumps necessary to actually get the hell out (individually deleting picture by picture, hunting down old wall posts, tiptoeing around the Internet for two weeks so as to not trip an account setting), I decided I was getting the hell out.

Most of the people I meet (there’re those tricky generalizations again), when they learn that I’m not on Facebook, will smile, nod, and give some variation of the response, “I wouldn’t be there either, but it’s a necessary evil.” And to be honest, this baffles me. In all the vast richness of the Internet world, tolerating screw-ups, discontinued services, flash-in-the-pan memes, GIFs that make ridiculous noises, terrible website design, trolling, spam and the occasional dramafest, these things I understand. But evil? Tolerating the consistent, non-consensual disregard of your personal autonomy because it makes it easier to plan your bar night?

Facebook has demonstrated over and over and over again that they do not care about their users as people; they care about their users as cash flow. Haven’t we all heard the horror stories about people with hacked Facebook accounts trying to contact someone, anyone from the site to help them? Did you know they’ve just activated at opt-out facial recognition feature?

I passionately hope that Google+ crushes Facebook with this launch. Right now I’m excited because they’re doing everything right that I think Facebook does wrong. I hope to soon be excited for the service itself, but for now, this is enough.

Here’s what I see in my early days as a Google+ user:

• I see a system designed by people who care about privacy the way that I care about privacy; not as an all-or-nothing commitment to be abandoned as passé, but as a reality of the current age, full of complexity and nuance.
• I see the ability to instantly and instinctively filter my friends to accurately reflect the true nature of my relationships (yes, I do have a “blood-family” and an “unblood-family” circle), and to control not only how I interact with those people, but how they are allowed to interact with me.
• I see features intuitively available at my fingertips that are clearly designed with my control and my privacy comfort in mind; for example, it is stunningly easy to test how another person sees my profile.
• I see Google employees practically begging beta users to send feedback, and I quote, “When this happens, whenever you are surprised or concerned, especially when this relates to PRIVACY, please, please use the Send Feedback button…” -Adam Wolenc

Here’s an interesting article about how “your Mom” won’t switch to Google+, essentially because most “average” users (i.e. not “geeks, insiders, social media stars, journalists, and other people…[with] strong social graphs”) are already locked into Facebook, and won’t get enough value from the features of Google+ to switch. When I read this at first I laughed and nodded, but as I think about it more I find that statement a little ridiculous.

To imply that an “average” user doesn’t want the ability to control their social media presence based upon the same distinctions that they apply to their day-to-day relationships is a misrepresentation of the role of social media in the user’s life. Let’s use my mom as an example (sorry, Mom). I happen to think it’d be pretty cool for my Mom to be able to see only posts from her family members instead of reading an entire list, or for her to put articles online to share only with coworkers, or to post the photos from our latest sailing trip so that only her closest friends can see them. Doesn’t that seem more in line with what an average user might really want? An intuitive way to treat people on the Internet the way you treat them in real life?

What’s more, maybe then she would actually get some value from a social media platform, instead of just having another empty profile out there in the ether.

Mom, the second they open Google+ invitations back up, I’m sending you one. Please switch.