Google Plus Shows More Identity Confusion at Google

Published on July 5th, 2011 by Jeremy Chatfield

Google *really* don’t get how confusing they’ve made user identity. I’m required to have a new Google Account for every AdWords Account I open. Admittedly most of our work on AdWords has been fixing existing accounts rather than starting new ones, but I’ve still personally started tens of accounts. That means that I have tens of Google Accounts – all me.

Now, that could cause a problem managing these accounts. I could use Google’s support for POP and IMAP and read the Gmail accounts for each of these into a central administration account. That’d mean quite a lot more work to set up each account – tripleing or even quadrupling the administration involved. But I’m a geek, and old UNIXy kind of geek. I know some stuff about nearly anything to do with operating systems… and mail systems were something I did some work on, over the years…

Within the mail system, that is inside the Gmail that is part of Google Apps, a plus sign after a name is a qualifier, not a different address. So if you send me email as “jeremyc+(make up something)@merjis.com” it still reaches me at jeremyc@merjis.com. IIRC, this usage is an old, often omitted or badly handled part of RFC822, the ancient mail system specification, from around the 1970′s. However, the Google Accounts (and consequently Google Plus) part of Google hasn’t worked out that the Gmail part of Google has made this work, and treats Google Account identities with a plus sign in the middle, as completely different entities, though, AFAICS, none of them can ever receive an email, at least when part of a Google Apps domain.

Google Apps still hasn’t merged its’ idea of identity with much of Google, so although my main identity is managed by Google, I have still had to re-use or create identities to play with Google’s stuff, outside the Google Apps domain. I don’t normally need to know which identity is which by given the different Google Identities differing user names, because the email addresses are checked by filters in Gmail and automatically allocated to client tags – so I can see at a glance which AdWords Account (or whatever) is receiving the email.

That was convenient for creating a lot of AdWords accounts, and have me automatically receive the emails, rather than having to set up IMAP support in a lot of Gmail accounts. But it was, to a substantial extent, relying on Google to be confused about identity. If they weren’t confused by email addresses, I’d have had to create other email addresses and do the IMAP thing to drag all the email to a central place for monitoring. More work for me, but I’m vigorously lazy – I’ll put a lot of work into understanding something, so I can achieve what I want, for less effort each time I do it.

I finally worked out what happened when I was invited to join Google Plus. The email went to jeremyc@merjis.com – a Google Apps account. On clicking to join, I got a new tab in the browser, and I was immediately logged in, with my name (not my email address) showing. However, I had been switched to the account jeremyc+money@google.com[*], which is the main Google Account that I use to interact with AdWords.

So, jeremyc+money@merjis.com is a Google Account, not a Google Apps Account. When I got the Google Plus invite, it automatically used the identity that was logged in as a Google Account. However, people are now sharing via Google Plus with jeremyc@merjis.com, and that’s not a Google Account with a Google Plus identity. So even though I receive all the Google Plus messages addressed to jeremyc@merjis.com in the account under Google’s management as jeremyc@merjis.com, I can’t read it, because Google Plus knows that the registered entity jeremyc+money@merjis.com is not jeremyc@merjis.com – and jeremyc@merjis.com can’t join Google Plus, even though jeremyc+money@merjis.com is a member of Google Plus, and jeremyc+money@merjis.com shares all its’ email completely and fully with jeremyc@merjis.com.

So… If you message me using Google Plus, I can’t respond, because you haven’t shared with me, although there is every appearance that you have, and I receive a message about you having shared with me. And that’s because although I’m me, there are a lot of different me’s maintaining complete identity separation including different passwords for access, except for total sharing of email. Confusing, eh?

Footnote – it isn’t really “jeremyc+money@merjis.com”. The *whole* reason for using another identity is because we’ve managed individual client spends of US$500k/month – so I don’t want hackers to know which Google Account is the MCC owner. If they hack the account, it causes a lot of misery and pain. So it is deliberately set up to be private, hard to guess, and with an ugly password. I’ve done that, because I don’t believe that Google does enough to protect AdWords accounts with large budgets (read “large budget” as as “larger than the average Joe could cover with some kind of credit card insurance”). My bank, on a much lower budget, makes me use an authentication device as much as twice per transaction on sub-$100 transactions, whereas Google seems to operate a very simple username plus password system for millon dollar budget accounts, which makes it relatively easier to hack than a bank…