It's OK to not like things.
then you best look for alternatives ASAP.
This is exactly what the author is doing.
But even when the good outweighs the bad, its totally fine to stay using a service without some obligation to pretend like the negatives don't exist or never talk about them.
Maybe Google should finally get over the fact that they've lost this fight and that noone wants to be in a social network whose member numbers are inflated by such desperate moves (which most of us have experienced now and are well aware of).
Maybe Firefox OS will be interesting, iOS isn't. And .. right now I can pay for Android apps, but I'm banned from rate them, comment on them. Ignoring all the 'Do you want to be tracked to provide Better Services (tm)" stuff in that ecosystem.
Google it--wait, no. Duckduckgo it ;)
The verb for searching the internet would have been Altavista had Altavista sounded like a verb:)
Sorry but the last time I tried, Amazon App store was a resource hog. Also apps will stop working if you get signed out of the Amazon app store app. It is like they are trying to prevent one guy who they think will buy a copy of their app, get on a stranger's device, log in to the app store, download their apps, and log out and repeat it for all devices in the world.
I'm never allowed to rate them, to comment on them in the Google Play store, since .. I cannot have a G+ account (and frankly, I don't want one).
Linking it to your legal identity isn't hard. Data show that just two ZIP Codes (in the US) can indentify an individual with 95% accuracy: your home and workplace.
Makes me want to rightgrade to an uncontracted dumbphone and a custom-ROMed tablet. Not linked to any Google accounts.
And no, I did not say eliminated. Just greatly reduced. (Again, the moreso after shuttering Reader, although I must say that while you could learn a lot about me from my blog reading list, its utility for selling me stuff was pretty low.)
De-anonymization has been studied and applied by various parties, and I'm personally aware of at least one non-LEO application. I don't know that Google does or doesn't do this, though it wouldn't surprise me at all if marketing/advertising and/or other "personalization" services did. It would annoy me intensely to find that they were.
For that the mere fact of a cell phone is enough to get everything you mentioned.
A dumb phone can only report coarse location information, SMS messaging, and calls data. Frequently expiring SIMs would limit the useful duration of much of that information, though you'd need something like a self-hosted Google Voice forwarding service to be able to use the phone usefully while maintaining reasonable anonymity. It's not currently practical for most purposes.
Relying on a Free Software VOIP service based on the tablet preferentially for voice calls would further reduce exposure.
It is very, very difficult to figure out how to not create duplicate Google+ profiles. There's no clear way to tell Google "This is a different email address that I, a person, use. You should link it to my personal profile".
DuckDuckGo is a cool company, and I think they have a neat product. But if you're worried about the NSA, then you're kidding yourself if you think DDG is safer than any other search engine. Just use Tor and be done with it.
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/08/duckduckgo-now-o...
Now its spread between yahoo, ddg, dropbox, etc. I feel even more strongly about Facebook. If and when a viable alternative is available, I'll be switching. Similarly with email. For the first time I'm starting to become open to paid email that is secure. I guess it has to be a non-US company.