Google login now requires Google+ Account

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6075811

by svitcov • 13 years ago

56 59 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Today, I went to login to a service that I signed up for many months ago using my Google account. In the past, clicking the 'sign in with Google' button with authenticate against my Google account and immediately log me in. However, today, I was prompted to create a Google+ profile with no other option. In other words, either I could create a Google+ account, or I could fuck off and never use the service again... Anyone else encountering this?

mknits• 13 years ago

It's time to dump Google. Alternatives: http://prism-break.org

eksith• 13 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this was already in place for quite a while. Google has slowly been trying to move away form pseudonyms altogether and force Real Name policies like Facebook and things like YouTube, Blogger, Docs etc... were all slowly tied to one login system.

This was a problem for me at first because I ended up with multiple accounts with no way to merge them together. But I believe they started with YouTube.

I got an email saying they will deactivate/delete the account without verifying it (in this case "verify" was to create a Google account). I'm guessing this was only sent to accounts that hadn't uploaded any videos and mine had none at the time. A friend of mine also got the same email and she had no videos at the time either.

It makes sense from their end to create one account, but adding Google+ seems to be a case of forced adoption. I've used multiple gmail addresses and they've all prompted me to create a new G+ account whenever I logged in just to check the inbox. If I wanted to add another service, I've been hit with some sort of conflict message. I think Google is able to tell when the same person uses multiple gmail addresses.

svitcov6• 13 years ago

You may well be correct - I only noticed this now as most of the sites I frequent are not linked to my Google account. I know YouTube has been bugging me to put in a Real Name for a while, but I was never prompted before to create a fully fledged G+ profile (incl birth date, gender...)

znowi• 13 years ago

The scary part is that the coercive push for Real Name, single identity is advantageous to both private sector (Google, Facebook, etc) and government (NSA, etc). The former get better tracking and ad revenues. The latter improved surveillance and control of the public.

nivla• 13 years ago

ha this reminds me of the time I wanted to start a Youtube channel for a niche website I own. The crazy part, when signing up for Youtube, they also sign you up for Google+ and then force you to use your full name as the channel's name. That means, if your company name is ACME, your company's official Youtube channel is "Ron Burgundy". After failing to find a solution using Google Search, I decided to go with the next best option, change the real name to something sensible like "Acme YTVideos". BAM! A day later I receive a email from Google asking me to submit documents to verify that name or they will forcefully revert the channel's name to the Youtube username (ACMEVideos). LOL!

cromwellian6• 13 years ago

What's with the Google Derangement Syndrome on HN recently? Any change in any Google service prompts the same "I'm taking all my toys and going home" response.

Google used to have a separate profile system just like profiles.yahoo.com, and like Yahoo, having lots of disparate services with weak unification was a problem. G+ is that unifying profile layer. Is it really beyond the pale for a service to prompt you to enter some optional information about yourself? Yes, optional, as in, I have hundreds of followers on G+ with obviously bogus profiles. You don't have to use G+'s social feed, you don't have to friend anyone.

I personally barely use Twitter or Facebook, mostly as single-sign-on to forums and other sites.

svitcov6• 13 years ago

If Google just wanted me to add a few relevant details to my primary account for some obvious useful purpose, details that would be kept private, I would happily oblige. However, this goes beyond that: Google is asking me to share information with no apparent application use (birth date?! gender???) to ANYONE who stumbles upon my G+ profile. I am not against unifying their services - in fact, this is what Google's basic authentication service should and could have done - but that is not the full extent of what is happening here, as far as I can tell.

tekacs• 13 years ago

You don't actually have to share those details publicly if you don't want, to be fair. :/

Edit: for comparison and openness's sake, my profile: https://plus.google.com/116103902550362700148/about

I have few qualms about sharing that, given that I know exactly what I've shared from there.

pessimizer3• 13 years ago

You must be replying to the wrong post. This post is asking whether others have been asked to create a g+ account in order to log in using Google, not "I'm taking all my toys and going home" or whatever childish way you want to characterize people who are "deranged" about Google.

ketralnis• 13 years ago

And how would you suggest that he reply to a growing trend that occurs as an aggregate across hundreds of disparate comments?

cromwellian6• 13 years ago

I'm talking about the other responses to the OP. Lately, if Google is mentioned on HN in a story, you are pretty much guaranteed that several of the off-topic responses will be either something about PRISM, Reader, or moving to DDG/FastMail, even if the story, for example, isn't even about PRISM or politics. Reader Derangement Syndrome is another, with people seriously proposing in some comments that Gmail is a shutdown risk given Reader.

G+ is Google's centralized system for single-sign-on and account profiles. It used to be confusingly distributed over multiple services, now it is unified. Oh, and it has a news feed associated on it at plus.google.com that you can totally ignore if you want.

Some of the reactions to this are way over the top. I guess I'm burning karma points by posting this, but it is an annoying trend.

6d0debc0714• 13 years ago

Google used to have a separate profile system just like profiles.yahoo.com, and like Yahoo, having lots of disparate services with weak unification was a problem.

No, it wasn't. It was very simple. You want an account for youtube, sign up on youtube, you want an account for something else - sign up there. You want your accounts to be the same login across all the services? Use the same login across all the services.

It wasn't confusing, it wasn't complex, it didn't present any problems to anyone of even moderate intelligence.

Is it really beyond the pale for a service to prompt you to enter some optional information about yourself?

It's not really optional when they start tying everything together. I don't want my real name tied to any of my online activities - but if my google accounts were stuck together through google+ it would be, because I use my real name on my phone.

It's possible to lie of course, and tell a different lie with a different email address for every time you want to limit the degree to which different portions of your data contaminate other things. But it's a pain in the arse and only realistically possible because they're not enforcing their single sign on policy that strongly yet.

They're made it far more complicated to keep your privacy than it was before.

cromwellian6• 13 years ago

Having to create a separate account on N services with the same credentials is simpler than having a unified account? And what if your login is already taken on one of the other services, now you're forced to have multiple credentials. And then when you need to update something, like change an email address, 2factor authentication, or some other feature, you've now got to edit settings on many services.

If you want an anonymous Google account, simply create one, which is what everyone has been doing for a long time, even for gmail prior to G+, people would create multiple accounts.

The model isn't K identities and N services, you need O(K*N) credentials in the worse case. It's K identities and N services is O(K) credentials.

andrewflnr• 13 years ago

Um, password re-use is well-known to be a Bad Thing, especially if you're using the same password for gmail as for some seedy site you were curious about. It increases your security attack surface.

TrevorJ• 13 years ago

The issue as I see it is that there's a certain non-zero chance of getting your account suspended from service x or y, sometimes for reasons that are not common sense or self-evident. Considering how integral Google Drive and Gmail are to many people's workflow, it isn't good that you are forced, in effect to take on more risk by having so many services linked to it.

As an example, there were cases of people losing access to Gmail after signing up for Google+ with a birthday that was too young to comply with the G+ TOS. Another example - it is fairly trivial to get an Adsense account suspended by using a script to commit click fraud against the target account. Similar things can be done to an ad-enabled Youtube channel. It's not outside the realm of possibility at all that a third party could cause you to lose access to your email account through one of these methods if your accounts are linked.

Gormo2• 13 years ago

What's with the Google Derangement Syndrome on HN recently? Any change in any Google service prompts the same "I'm taking all my toys and going home" response.

This seems to be a bit of an inverted perspective. The trend in Google's behavior seems to indicate its own "I'm taking my toys and going home" mindset. This is almost literally true: Google is telling people who are using their "toys" "either come to my house and play under my rules, or you don't get to play with that anymore."

having lots of disparate services with weak unification was a problem.

How is this a "problem"? What about the many users who want to choose specific services a-la-carte, and not be forced into compromising their preferences with one type of service just to have access to their preferred solution for another?

"Unification" of services in this heavy-handed way is like Comcast telling its customers that if they want cable service, they have to get phone service from Comcast too, whether they want it or not.

ams6110• 13 years ago

Note to web services businesses: give your users the option to have a local account, and give them an option to change from one 3rd party authenticator to another or to a local account.

svitcov6• 13 years ago

This would be an ideal solution for this situation, but the problem remains: if I cannot authenticate via the 3rd party initially, the service has no way of knowing that I am actually the owner of the account. I am not sure what the working implementation of this looks like.

pessimizer3• 13 years ago

Email verification with a newly generated local password. That's what Meetup did after I quit Facebook, and it was only 3-4 minutes of friction.

Grue3• 13 years ago

It's just so they can brag about having more "active users" than Twitter/Facebook/whatever.

turing5• 13 years ago

That's not really fair. Google has been pretty good about defining activity on G+, much more so than either Twitter or Facebook. For example, they give individual numbers for total users visiting G+ on web/mobile, people using G+ features across all products (+1s, shares, comments), and total number of accounts.

frostmatthew3• 13 years ago

Source? (all I've ever heard is that Google considers someone an "active" G+ user if they have a G+ account and have used any Google product over the period in question)

mieses• 13 years ago

Most of my family members will sooner dump Gmail than create a Google+ account.

svitcov6• 13 years ago

I feel similarly. What I've been doing is just deleting my G+ account each time Google creates it, but if it becomes too much of an issue, I will be forced to switch. A real pity - I love gmail.

cromwellian6• 13 years ago

Some would say having your family members avoid G+ is one of the primary benefits of G+. So instead of being barraged by a stream of photos of cousins and aunts you haven't seen in decades, or discussing family gossip, you get to engage in interesting conversations based on people with similar strong interests in particular topics.

None of the people I follow on G+ are 'friends' with the exception of co-workers, instead, they are people who have very interesting things to say and who I like interacting with. Twitter would be a comparable use case, but it is too annoying to have long form stream discussions with followers like this.

frostmatthew3• 13 years ago

That doesn't sound like a very good "primary benefit" since Google's strategy is clearly to get as many people to use G+ as possible. Either a) they'll be successful and your G+ stream will be barraged by "photos of cousins and aunts" anyway or b) it's not successful and they pull the plug.

dannyr2• 13 years ago

Wow. This is the worst thing that could happen.

Creating a Google+ account is such a travesty.

It's such a waste of time and effort that could be better spent ranting on Hacker News.

You should avoid everything Google.

In principle, avoid any site that displays Google ads. By visiting ads, you're enabling Google to do all these evil things.

pacomerh• 13 years ago

Pff Evil things. Are you a saint now?

EugeneOZ• 13 years ago

I'll better avoid advices, based on blind hate.

isarang• 13 years ago

you should try google plus.. try communities and follow some googlers :)

plg2• 13 years ago

the problem is that I may want a gmail account or I may want to use google hangouts to videochat with friends or I may want or need to use google calendar ... but I do NOT want to have a social network account. Google has made it so I have no choice.

turing5• 13 years ago

I'm curious, why are you so vehemently opposed to having an account? You could very easily just not provide public profile information, never post, and never add anyone.

viraptor• 13 years ago

Not sure about plg's reason, but I will avoid ever creating a plus account due to their strange policies for name verification. I'm not sure if it was improved lately or not, but many accounts were suspended previously when names didn't look English as far as I remember. Mine's definitely not an English one and it contains some non-ascii characters. Avoiding services which require plus accounts is much easier than dealing with potential account suspension.

plg2• 13 years ago

which begs the question ... why do I need a G+ account?

It's not like I am asking google to implement some ability that has previously been not implemented... rather google has decided to eliminate a little piece of choice ... or freedom ... or whatever you want to call it ... for their users. Why? Because it's better for them.

Which brings one back to something that has been posted many many times ... you are not the customer, you are the product. As long as you're OK with that, go for it... but my bet is that the vast majority of google's users have little concept of the issue of customer vs product.

I'm just a little sad to see google take another step towards being a faceboob instead of taking one step away from them.

6d0debc0714• 13 years ago

I used to review apps on the play store before it switched over to google+, and a number of the comment systems on websites I go to use it now so I don't comment on them anymore.

nacs• 13 years ago

I noticed this also. Why should I give my real name to post a review of a game I play on my Android for 5 minutes?

Some of this forced Google plus integrations they're doing are just getting ridiculous.

Lagged2Death• 13 years ago

Yes, I was required to set up a Google+ account some time ago to re-log-in to YouTube or Picasa Web Albums - I don't remember which. The description of what was going on didn't make it clear to me that following the prescribed steps would create a Google+ account, but that was the effect.

However, there was a saving grace, as far as I'm concerned. I was allowed to remove my real name from my Google account and use my ancient on-line alias instead. That's all I ever wanted.

gaara872• 13 years ago

I think its picasa

oellegaard• 13 years ago

This is super stupid. I have two business accounts and a personal account. Google now forced me to have 3 Google Plus profiles - and yes, I did discover exactly the same.

I'm actively trying to replace Google with other things. They clearly lost their sense of quality.

packetslave• 13 years ago

Can I ask which service it was where this happened? It's possible this is a bug or an OAuth setting that's specific to the site in question. Feel free to email if you prefer (address in profile)

edit: grammar

buro9• 13 years ago

Google Apps allows domain owners to disable G+.

Will this option vanish?

gaara872• 13 years ago

Finally! Google as a company unifying their user login. Its about time.

For privacy freaks like me: share only what you want. If you dont like this, you have the freedom to leave the service at anytime (along with deleting all your data also)

rekursiv• 13 years ago

I just tested this and was able to sign into userstyles.org just fine on a blank account with no G+ profile. Are you sure it wasn't an option that the third-party service was enabling?

Google login now requires Google+ Account

Related Stories