As if consumers didn't have enough reasons to avoid Google Plus.
By now it's well known that companies put things like this in their ToS. People who claim to value privacy, or want to make sure their data isn't used in a certain way should be reading the ToS.
By now it's well known that companies do things like this. Whether it's in their TOS is irrelevant, and whether you read it is irrelevant. You just have to assume they're going to do things like this, just like you have to assume that the NSA is reading your proctology results.
The fact that you, nominatively, +1'd something is shown?
> If you didn't want people to see your +1, why would you +1 it?
Let's not collapse +1 and reviews, reviews are expected to be nominative and public unless otherwise specified. A +1 is (was) an anonymous message to the content creator/owner, and an aggregated message to other viewers (through the +1 count). Just because you enjoy Tenga's Iroha Midori and want to tell Tenga they made a customer happy does not mean you want all your acquaintances to know.
"These new endorsements will only be visible to the people who you originally shared that activity with though; most content will therefore be restricted to a specific circle from Google+, although ratings and reviews posted on Google Play or Google+ Local will be visible to the wider public."
Reviews are public, like they're meant to be. +1's are restricted to whomever you shared the +1 with in the first place. Does this not entirely mean that this data is shared with the relevant people already? The only difference is that this is being merged with AdSense.
Again, if you didn't want people to see your +1, why would you have shared that +1 with these people in the first place?
Nothing is being made visible that wasn't previously visible, it's just that content is now appearing alongside other stuff.
It also de facto makes you constantly switching between accounts, which tends to be annoying.
Oh, email? There's lots of other providers.
It's not hard at all.