OP here.

First off: thanks for the visibility. I've been railing about this pretty much since G+ started (originally with nymwars) and Google just seems to continue not getting it. Mega thanks to David for getting this on the queue and everyone who upvoted. For something which was just a throwaway post (as I said: I was looking for one of my own earlier instances and stumbled across a whole trove), this had legs.

The HN moral: sometimes your best work is the stuff that takes little effort, thought it helps to hit the Zeitgeist wave just right.

I ... don't dislike Google, though the company's made itself vastly harder to like, and for me personally, its brand equity has been tremendously hurt by my experience to its corporate goals and motives surrounding G+, pretty much from the start. My history with the company goes back further -- I was using its search during beta in 1998/1999, and the reason was simple: it made things easier for me, and performed useful tasks, far better than anyone else at the time.

For a long time I saw Google bashing as almost entirely a Microsoft phenomenon, but I've got to say that's no longer the case. I'm absolutely no friend of Redmond's, and have watched events there over the past few months with no small amount of schadenfreude. There's no question that Microsoft continues to bash Google (sometimes effectively, often pretty cluelessly). It's very clear to me that there's a pretty solid and consistent backlash not just from techies, but as the G+ search I ran made clear, from ordinary people sick of intrusive questions.

I could wax on about privacy, and people who could be endangered or put in harm's way or find their lives ruined or what if Stalinist Nazi Cthulu buys Google... and all of that's entirely valid, but it's besides the point. Even if none of that applies, and you prefer not to have your personal data aggregated, if you say "no", the meaning is simple: "no". Stop asking. Don't go ahead and do it anyway. Don't put buttons where they're likely to get hit accidentally, or confusing dialogs, or interstitials, or anything else.

Because it's about respect.

But even if none of the factors above apply, the simple fact that I've and many, many others have made amply clear that no, we don't wish to provide this information, no, we don't wish to link our various associated identities, and no, we don't want to be part of your "identity network", means that Google (and, to be fair, a great many other companies and entities) are going OUT OF THEIR WAY TO EXPLICITLY DISRESPECT THAT PREFERENCE.

And that Google, very, very clearly, no longer respects me, or any of its users, based on far too many of its actions. Where Google used to make a decent coin offering incidental ads on top of a useful services, it's ... lost its way.

The data aggregation is one part of it. "No" means "No". It's a really simple message.

Somewhat ironically, I'd recently kicked off a G+ Community (private and invite only, sorry, I've actually transferred ownership to others as well) to discuss an anti-harassment policy following a long and detailed discussion:

https://plus.google.com/108316670838828910396/posts/9gMF3qyq...

Google's own inability to play by similar rules is ... interesting.

I'd also been reviewing some older posts, mine and other people's, as well as many of the YouTube top contributor responses (Reggie, Jonathan Paula, and others). Three points that kept getting made again and again were:

1. Google's interfaces make tons of work for users. It's sort of the anti-Perl: they make easy things hard (and tedious), and hard things impossible. Responding to YouTube comments, muting or blocking users, flagging spam, setting volume controls, managing Circles, checking on blocked / muted users, and on and on. In particular the fact that to take care of a problem here and now you've got to go somewhere else within the site to deal with it. The lack of concurrent controls is ... maddening.

2. There was no direct control over things. Google apparently are trying to handle everything "behind the scenes" through machine intelligence. And far too often doing an absolutely miserable job of it, especially where some very basic controls (dismiss post, time-out a user, comment moderation tools for posts) would help tremendously. I've seen some suggestions that earlier iterations (Wave or Buzz) are considered to have failed in part because their interfaces were too complex, but if anything G+ suffers from too few controls. And one sign of an oversimplified interface is that people start devising conventions to get around limitations. This happens on G+ in spades.

3. Noise controls. People's streams are absolutely out of control. I'd noted starting in March or thereabouts that I was finding Notifications and Search far more useful than my Stream. In a discussion of the +1 automatic share issue, Lauren Weinstein's guests similarly noted that they were using their Streams less and less:

https://plus.google.com/events/c0sddcekptbf047pb3if23rfvjc

In particular, Robert Scoble (the old noisemaker hisself) has ranted repeatedly and epicly on the lack of proper noise controls on G+, from pretty much day 1. This is from about a year in, but few of the points have been addressed:

https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts/9mA8XCdu...

When I go to a site such as Hacker News or Reddit, I typically look at the front page first to see what's been selected. Because, well, it's been selected. G+ Streams and Communities don't do that. I turn to them, if at all, after going through Notifications or explicitly searching for things. I recently suggested G+ fix "What's Hot" by simply renaming it "What's Rot".

Who really nailed it for me though was Homer Slated's comment on this issue at G+ (NB: it's a touch piquant):

https://plus.google.com/102946757503830834230/posts/Mim3MwZT...

In a comment he writes, that when receiving a Notification from Google:

[W]hat Google is doing is, essentially, telling me that it's found a word in the dictionary that I might be interested in, that it's seven letters long and contains the letter "g", but rather than just telling me what the word is, or even linking directly to it, it simply links me to a dictionary, then expects me to spend hours trawling through that dictionary just to finds that word....

It helps to understand that Google is not a search company, or a social networking outfit, or an email provider ... it's an advertising company, and therefore everything it does is oriented toward the principle of "promotion"....

While I have no doubt that Google has highly sophisticated search algorithms working behind the scenes, the results that you and I are actually presented with, and the mechanisms for obtaining those results, are skewed toward "buzz", not accuracy or relevance.

In other words, if Google were a news organisation, it wouldn't be reporting the news, it would be fabricating it, then tailoring that work of fiction to appeal to (what it believes is) your "general" interests.

If there was a single word that could concisely sum up Google, it would be "vague". Google is deliberately vague, it's notifications are vague, the way it handles articles and comments is vague, its search results are vague ... and by no accident. Google is deliberately vague because it wants to steer you away from what's actually relevant to you, and what actually interests you, to those things it wants you to become interested in.

In a G+ post I discussed lies. The common one is the lie of commission: I tell you something that's not true, a fabrication. Another, slightly more nuanced, is the lie of omission -- neglecting to inform you of a material fact. You'll find it especially referenced in business contracts, particularly real-estate and M&A concerning adverse conditions. A third type is what I've called a "lie of diversion". It's generally not a truth or a non-truth itself, but its purpose is to obscure truth, meaning, and relevance. It's at the heart of much of what's wrong (IMO) with "viral media" and messages -- little non-facts floating around in little non-informational nuggets, clogging up your cognitive circuits. And processing all that non-information takes a lot of effort.

https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/5zrCkbzR...

The biggest problem with G+ I was consistently running into was simply the non-relevance of what it was presenting me. And that's a change fundamentally due, I suspect, to its reliance on advertising and the culture this brings.

Google thought it could ride the advertising tiger when it opted to go that way early in its career. And for a time it did. But in a long and storied career of riding tigers, I've learned two things: ultimately the tiger is in control, and dismounting is the hardest part.

The lack of respect is why I feel that Google's corporate culture is fundamentally broken. Whether it's a rotten core or a rotten head I don't know. I absolutely don't question that there are some very well-meaning people working for Google, especially within the engineering staff. Possibly high on the org chart. But enough people, in enough positions of power, and I strongly suspect Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, and Vic Gundotra as being part of that group, either don't get it, are actively pursuing personal data aggregation, or, and this actually frightens me more: have been persuaded that it's in their best interest to follow this path via a deal they cannot refuse.

Frankly, none of those possibilities does much to give me any level of faith in the company. Or in any centrally-organized personal data-gathering effort.