Good luck with "avoiding" it. It's getting harder and harder to use Google without using Google+ (clearly intentional), and it's nearly equally hard to use the internet without using Google.
Yeah there is more than a little bit of selection bias going on here.
What percentage of criminals are dumb enough to get noticed and/or caught? Well, we don't know how many don't get noticed, so let's call it zero. Bam, 100% get noticed/caught!
It's worth remembering that the "Revenue" number would count bitcoins twice if they were used in two transactions. If bitcoins used to buy something on the site were then used by the seller to buy something else, the revenue would be twice the total bitcoins used.
Google+ deserves to wither and die because of the BS they have pulled.
When I'm forced to create a Google+ account just to use some of the basic features of the corporate Google Apps account which my company already paid for, it becomes quite clear there is no one at Google who gives a damn about customers. They are just trying to inflate their numbers at all possible costs.
It will be a great day when companies are finally forced to stop playing the "number of signups" game and start playing the "number of people who actually like our service and use it willingly" game instead (and no, we're not there yet; not even close).
All this talk about process, but not a word about the quality of the SDK itself. Android is quite frankly still very far behind when it comes to really basic things. Here's just one example: iOS has had easy support for custom fonts in native UI elements since the early days, meanwhile here is the situation on Android:
We have mainly been doing iOS apps but we are hearing demand from customers about having an option in Android so one of our developers (who is definitely much more of an Apple fan) has been experimenting with the Android SDK and he has been very impressed with the Android SDK. He has found many things to be far easier in the Android SDK than with iOS. His main complaint is with the emulator which is extremely frustrating to use but since it's dead easy to use your device that's not as big of a deal.
At least I gave an example. "Many things" are not just easier, but "far" easier? Like what? I've got plenty more examples, but I'd really like to hear about these "many" things which are "far" easier than in iOS.
Don't worry, they will work it so that there is a very expensive and labyrinthine process for privacy "compliance" for companies operating in the US which will purely by coincidence be so expensive and convoluted that only the big companies will be able to afford it. Just to reiterate, this will be 100% accidental and will in no way reflect an intent on the part of the established players to create a de-facto barrier to entry for potential competitors. You know you can trust them because the meeting was behind closed doors and both they and the president refused to comment on it.
