If you don't want to use those services, just don't visit them. What's the issue?
>If you don't want to use those services, just don't visit them. What's the issue?
A lot of people did leave YouTube because of it, but that means they lost all their playlists and favourites and comments. Also that can't ever repair things for the people who had aspects of their personal lives suddenly exposed by Google sticking their real life identity on their previously pseudonymous YouTube videos and comments.
How is that possible, considering I'm still called "icebraining" on YouTube, and I never had to associate a real name with my account?
Are you sure your account is not linked to a Google+ account? Then you'd be part of the very small percentage that successfully blocked all the popup reminders and dialogues and thus never complied. For me, that was only possible by blocking the dialogues via adblock, and over times by not login in anymore.
> Before the final forced conversion they spent months and months trying to trick people into agreeing to change their account against their will using a bunch of interface design dark patterns.
There was no way for me to say "no, I don't want it, stop asking me". And they kept changing the pop-up locations. And once linked, the accounts couldn't be unlinked.
So no, you weren't "forced", but there was some really shady coersion