Why Google+ Doesn’t Care If You Never Come Back

I read the article and was on my way back to post the same thing. Couldn't agree more. Gender, Birthday, Location come with every Google account, and as we are all acutely aware, this information is shared under Google's new privacy policy.

To say that the G+ team doesn't care if people use G+ is ridiculous.

But there's a whole lotta other info to fill out. Like cities you've lived in, companies you've worked at. People just love to fill those forms out.

And at signup they identify external accounts (can't really tell what they really called it as I literally deleted my + account 5 minutes ago). My Flickr-account showed up correctly and I could confirm it was mine. That means they could start extracting data from other services (Flickr, Twitter etc) and your activity and social graph there.

This info coupled with Gmail, Contacts, GReader faves, browsing stats (via sites that have Analytics on them and you being logged into your Google Account), searches, Android phone with registered credit card in market, Geo data via starred stuff on Maps, Latitude data & Google Talk messages will give them a quite impressive picture of the entire you. Just some extra fields in a profile might not sound like much, but I think we have to realize that this is just a brick in a _very_ large scale project.

I read it the same way you did but then I guess the point is that people are not coming back. So for this reason, the headline is worth the mention.