I'm fully aware of that. I just tried, if at all possible, to minimize the damage I brought onto myself. And to also try and show my hoopers how serious the privacy issue is.
I have to disagree. The changes (esp in regards to privacy policy) are what made me jump ship to G+ in the first place. And based on the comments from most of my friends on FB at the time, they weren't happy either.
See my reply to pron, but yes. Everyone, and all business, that I want to know me are in my contacts on another service. I also use Thunderbird, and PGP when possible, with my gmail account so at least I don't see any advertising.
I jumped on board early when I received an invite. I despised FB and was looking for for something that might actually resemble the tribe.net model of freedom and anonymity.
Unfortunately, I was told that I had to use my real name and signed up accordingly.
Everything was going along fine for about the first 9 months until I got into a small flame war with a woman in Canada about Scientologists (I used to work for some). That turned out to be the end of G+ for me.
It seems that the woman reported me for using a pseudonym, which to me and a few of my friends I obviously wasn't. I was livid! I immediately protested loud and clear in my timeline. One of my "hooped" IRL friends works at Yahoo! and told me that he had good connections at Google and could probably fix it for me. And that if he couldn't do that that he could at least vouch for me.
As he was trying to work his magic the pressure from Google was getting stronger. I had a big notice across my profile telling me that if I didn't provide legal proof of who I was that my account would be suspended in a week. I received the same threats in my gmail. So I started trying to work with them on this matter only to find that I was dealing with bots. I was beyond frustrated!
A few days later my friend came back to me and told me that there didn't seem to be much that he could do. I sure as hell didn't want to send them my my ID or birth certificate! So I caved in, scanned a court document with my full name on it and a judge's signature, and gmail'd it it.
I should mention that by this point Google had decided to lock my profile and place a huge notice across it demanding documents.
It took almost a full 2 weeks for them to get back to me and say that my document was legit. Well, duh!!
With my new found "legal" status I continued to use G+ for about another year or so. But as time marched on I became more and more disillusioned with Google and their products and interacted less and less with G+.
Then June 5th 2013 happened and I was introduced to the world of Edward Snowden. I immediately went and deleted everything from my profile and timeline (no small chore!). I then put a notice on my "about" page stating that due to privacy issues with Google and the NSA that this account is no longer active.
I now only use my gmail account, have been a happy DDG and IXquick user since before this all went down, and haven't been back to G+ since.