This isn't even about your own perceived "real name". If I have a relationship with a company and they know my real name I expect them not to leak it to the world. Period. My business is with them and that's about it.
When you initially signed up with GMail you signed up for an e-mail address, not a public directory that links your e-mail address to your real name.
When you signed up to YouTube, you signed up providing a pseudonym. The implicit assumption is that your pseudonym is used to identify yourself to other users of the same service. You did not expect your comments, your videos and interactions to be linked to your real name.
The same principle applied to virtually every Google service.
Google broke that trust with a series of glaring mistakes.
I honestly lost any ounce of trust I ever had in Google.
I have no fucking idea what they have done with my real name.
Every day there is a possibility that Google has come up with yet another obscure shit service that decides to integrate itself with a user's main account and trumpet real life information to the world without the user's consent.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Google's blown every shred of trust I have in it. I've used the company's services since 1998, for search, for mail, its OS, its corporate tools.
To the extent I can avoid using them now (and in the case of email where another party uses Google it's pretty much impossible), I do. And will continue to reduce my footprint.
And I can trace pretty much all of that to G+ and specific statements and actions of Eric "I'll sue you for publishing my home address" Schmidt, Sergey "Sleeping with my subordinate" Brin, and Larry "We'll fight the NSA while carrying their water" Brin. Honorable mentions to Vic "Not my real name" Gundotra and others.
Are there still good people at Google? Yes. Has the company lost its soul? Completely.
I'm sympathetic, but my view is that nothing I do online or electronically (text messages, email, etc.) is really private. The temptations for companies like Google, Facebook, etc. to abuse their trust are just too great to think it won't happen. If there's something I don't want anyone to know, I don't reveal it. I don't use G+, LinkedIn, or Facebook. I don't put deeply private things in email or text messages. Even here, I would not post anything private because if HN or any authority ever decided they wanted to find out who I am, it would almost certainly be possible.
There's a reason why I was using my G+ account pseudonymously.
However, when Google went out of its way to link up multiple accounts despite my telling them not to, the trust was broken. It's one thing to make an inadvertent disclosure yourself on some mailing list or another, it's quite another to have activities from multiple sources aggregated and de-anonymized for you.
I'm of an age which learned "you don't transact personal business online". I've found e-commerce, online banking, social networking, and the like to be highly curious in that regard, and the long tail of tears (yes, with many successes) to be rather predictable. Maintaining an offline separation for these activities isn't a perfect solution either, though it does generally provide me with plausible deniability and far fewer opportunities to worry about disclosure, though integrating surveillance into phones with integrated GPS tracking your location everywhere makes things a tad more difficult (read Stallman's many postings on this topic).
It's not that I'm planning on a life of crime or terror, but I've already seen my (largely professional / intellectual) online activities come back to me, and by disassociating myself from what I do in my online an offline life (much as you describe), I'm sparing myself that pain.
Facebook is arguably worse than Google in this regard, but both companies have a positively autistic lack of emotional comprehension over this issue.
Privacy is not all or nothing. It is about context. Information _x_ may be shareable with person _p_, but might be an invasion of privacy if it is shared with other people.
So "not putting deeply private stuff in an email" is not practical in general. Even shallowly private stuff would become deeply private in a different context.
Nothing you do online is really private. But maybe some of it should be. And if Google, Facebook, et al. hadn't been slowly lowering the bar of privacy protection, we might've had a more robust culture of privacy in Silicon Valley.
> When you signed up to YouTube, you signed up providing a pseudonym. The implicit assumption is that your pseudonym is used to identify yourself to other users of the same service. You did not expect your comments, your videos and interactions to be linked to your real name.
This point I particularly identify with and it's gotten to the point where I no longer comment on YouTube videos nor leave app reviews on Google Play because I don't want my real name published everywhere on the web.
I can't even begin to identify with the transgender community about the issues Google have willingly created.
I think it's about time the EU (or other governing body) stepped in an mandated that users are entitled to pseudonyms for internet services.
I doubt the EU (or other governing bodies) are very willing to help.
If they were to decide, everything you put on the 'net would be digitally signed with a key on your passport. (yeah, slight hyperbole - unfortunately not too much)
When you initially signed up with GMail you signed up for an e-mail address, not a public directory that links your e-mail address to your real name.
When you signed up to YouTube, you signed up providing a pseudonym. The implicit assumption is that your pseudonym is used to identify yourself to other users of the same service. You did not expect your comments, your videos and interactions to be linked to your real name.
The same principle applied to virtually every Google service.
Google broke that trust with a series of glaring mistakes.
I honestly lost any ounce of trust I ever had in Google.
I have no fucking idea what they have done with my real name.
Every day there is a possibility that Google has come up with yet another obscure shit service that decides to integrate itself with a user's main account and trumpet real life information to the world without the user's consent.