OP's G+ post was a link to a reshare of mine (a story in itself).

I've just made a far-too-long reply to the "Dear Googles: Stop asking" story also trending on HN (how'd I get so lucky? No idea, but thanks). I'll try keeping things shorter here, though recommend reading this as well:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6748332

First: this is fundamentally about respect and trust. Google respecting user's stated preferences regarding disclosure, and users trusting that Google will do so. I argue at length above that the first is absent and the second has been destroyed. This is quite bad for Google's reputation in the long run, especially as a cloud services company.

I'm finding this ... exceptionally confounding given Google's apparent strident opposition to NSA and other surveillance (a position of Google's I unreservedly applaud). As I've argued before, Google with their ever-expanding and increasingly aggressive personal information aggregation efforts are carrying the NSA's water. Personal information can be an asset, but it's also a tremendous liability when misused or mismanaged.

The fact that I've participated in multiple forums (including G+, Hacker News, Reddit, StackExchange, and elsewhere) pseudonymously over the past several years should show that it's possible to carry on reasoned discussions as such. I'd rather intentionally set up this persona to give me both freedom and an at least partially credible reputation for some discussions. As an experiment it's worked pretty well.

What happened with the YouTube / G+ integration (Anschluss as I term it) above is that three Google services I'd independently registered: Gmail, YouTube, and G+, collapsed the walls between each. I'd set these up beginning in 2008 as I determined I'd want a long-term resident pseudonym and I gradually started extending it to additional services. When G+ was first beta'd, I'd initially signed up under my own name, but was quickly convinced by Eric Schmidt's "identity service" comments and NymWars that this was probably not the way I wanted to go, so I wiped that account and set up a pseudonymous one (against G+ TOU at the time). At some point I'd also configured a YouTube account, using the same Gmail account to register both. My views on video viewing (as with much else) are that it's a private activity and, even pseudonymously, I don't share my viewing actions with others unless I fully consciously intend to do so. Some of us with longer memories recall Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and the snooping of his video rental habits, as well as librarians who resisted FBI attempts to turn up patron's library records.

So I had and intended to retain a wall between the two accounts.

And Google knocked it down.

So I posted about it. And I'm trying to figure out what to do with my G+ account, so when Andi re-shared my post and found that other's couldn't re-share her (excellent) content, I recommended she keep the re-share (as that will preserve my own content should I purge it or leave G+), and create a new post linking to her own re-share. That's ... one of many hoops G+ makes you jump through. All. The. Time.

Not only did Google demolish that wall, against my intent, but there's no clear way to undo that action. As I mentioned to Yonatan Zunger, this is no longer about UI/UX, workflows, tools, or technology, it's about trust. And Google have very clearly demonstrated that they cannot be trusted to maintain a confidence expressly stated as such.

Trust is a privilege I give once. Never twice.

In my case, the actual damage to my reputation and person is minimal: I don't exist. There is no Edward Morbius, he's a reference to a 1958 film character whose abbreviated username looks vaguely interesting. For someone such as Andi S, it's another story. For some people, this could be career, relationship, or life-ending. Google's inability to grasp just how wrong what they've done is ... is absolutely unconscionable. I really don't get it.

But even for the ordinary person with nothing to fear who'd tried to do what an Andi, or Edward Snowden, or Karen Silkwood, or Deep Throat, or Ai Weiwei, or countless others have done, but simply wishes to keep different aspects of their online activities separated would find their wishes disrespected.

And that's really low.

It's also not isolated. I won't re-cap my other HN comment here, other than to note that the lack of respect shown here seems endemic to G+ generally, and increasingly to Google as a company. Where it once provided useful tools which made my life easier and richer, it increasingly gets in my way and sets up traps. This isn't a good sign.