You don't seem to appreciate what a major change G+ will be for some of Google's users. I for one would never want the following scenario from the article to happen. Ever.

    "You'll go to search for a camp stove on Google, 
    and you'll find that your friend just bought one, and 
    you'll be able to ask him about it," says Dylan Casey,
    a former Google+ product manager who now works at Path 
    Inc., a smartphone-based social network.

Had I known that Google would one day decide to go social and share my private life, possibly without my consent, then I would have never "gleefully accepted the thousands of dollars worth of free services" in the first place. Fact is that this is a change of direction for Google and people have every right to voice their opinion about it... just like the TOS with Instagram... How is this any different?

First of all, how credible is a Path PM's opinion on the "camp stove" example? Conflict of interest, anyone? Did Vic G or anyone official at Google say that's going to happen?

IMHO, what's more likely to happen is: You search for a camp stove, and your G+ friend has written a _public_ review of one, and your personalized search results show your friend's review as well. Personally, I would find that quite helpful since I can now contact my friend directly about this, but even if you don't, why not disable personalized results for yourself?

That's a quote from "a former G+ product manager". His credibility is beside the point anyway... this was a hypothetical feature mentioned in the article that conveniently illustrated a potential privacy concern.

(To your prediction of how this feature might play out in reality I would say that you are probably right, but also that I don't give two shits about what my friends buy OR about what they publicly review.)

What we know for certain is that Google is aggressively pushing its users onto G+ and that is the real heart of the problem. It's a bait-and-switch. I have no intention of using Google as a social network and I have no guarantees that I will be able to opt out of current or future features. The writing is on the wall -- Google will be social. That upsets some people.

Thousands of dollars' worth? Stretching it, I'd say.

Anyway. Yes. Personal responsibility... for not being cynical enough to realize that you never should have trusted the nefarious fiends like Google to begin with when you started using their services.

No, really though: when someone like Google lulls a bunch of people into thinking that they'll be doing one thing, and then do another, that's what the layman calls "bait and switch". (Go ahead, blame the victims.)

The economist would examine the system, question whether there was any tendency toward a natural monopoly because of network effects (possible but not certain), and point out that because there are high switching costs that the market for social media and like services doesn't really meet the prerequisites for being an efficient one (low transaction costs). The result is an inefficient market causing a deadweight loss to society, at least in the short to intermediate run... still nothing to celebrate in any event.

We already provide Google with a payoff: They give us good search results/Youtube videos in exchange for eyeballs on their ads. Now this ramming of their surveillance network down our throats is obnoxious, and complaining is hardly the bad form you are making it out to be.

The problem here is that there's almost no paid alternative: Gmail still has the best web UI, and do you know any search company with a subscription fee? That is, there's no alternative payment method: you pay with personal details, dollars not accepted.