I've found it to be an interesting, valuable, informative way to keep up with news, to meet people whose social spheres I wouldn't have otherwise encountered, and to have thoughtful, ongoing conversations. It's a space where I'm engaged in political, social, and specific-group-related commentary (gender and sexual minorities, disability-related discussions.)
I knew that, by using G+ publicly, I was giving up a carefully-considered amount of privacy -- but that was associated with a single nym, not my larger online identity.
Does Google know who I am? Yeah, sure. What I didn't want was Joe Public (or, worse, Joe YouTube) being able to track me cross-platform, which is why I never associated it with my normal persistent pseudonym or my other spheres of online activity.
I'm criticizing G+ from G+, because I'd love to see some changes made by Google. That's the best way I have of reaching an audience that includes Google employees, and it's also the platform where I've had the most frequent discussions of online privacy, etc.
Sure, I could try to go in and delete everything I've ever posted, now that Google has pulled its latest anti-privacy move. What, exactly, would that accomplish? It's still cached, and as various people will tell you, it's difficult to fully delete a G+ profile, unless you'd like to give up using all Google services (and I have yet to find a mail provider who gives me similar utility for free, or for a low price.)
I didn't mind the targeted ads in Gmail, they were the price I paid for using the service. What I do mind is the forced merging and integration of activities and nyms which users had repeatedly requested not be merged (I declined to merge my YT account repeatedly.)
Since I wasn't an active YT user, and I was able to re-link my YT profile to a dead-end G+ page after the fact, I have not been directly harmed.
But if I'd been someone who was an active YT content provider on a controversial subject, for example, or if I'd been outed in some way by the merge, or if I'd actually FOLLOWED Google's real-name policy and used my full legal name as they had wanted, there was certainly the potential for substantial harm to be done -- because that allows people to follow me (and other users) home -- both virtually and physically.
Google's convenience for data-marketing shouldn't outweigh personal safety or privacy concerns. I'm less distressed by their having the information available than I am with them sharing it with the public, after repeatedly declining their "offer" and not being given the option to opt-out.
The existence of a work-around (a dead-end "page") does not mean that the action was an acceptable one to take in the first place -- and it took a savvy user advising me of the work-around to cause me to look up how to do it . . . there wasn't an option for me to do so at the time they merged my accounts, which would have solved a lot of the related privacy concerns.
She can, in fact, delete Google+ and keep Gmail. Try it. I have!
Since Google supposedly runs on data, the only way Google is going to figure out their problems is if people delete Google+ or stop using it. Otherwise there's no such thing as bad publicity, especially if you're an advertising company.