I think Google cares more about privacy than most companies.
Everyone (including Google[0]) agrees that they made privacy mistakes with Google Buzz. And I think that they've worked hard to improve privacy in their products since then. That's why Google+ has used circles from the beginning: the Google+ experience emphasizes choosing the right people to share you content with (as opposed to the standard "share with the public" or "share with all my friends" which was standard at the time). At the time when Google+ launched, it had one of the strongest sets of privacy settings on the market[1]. Other competitors have since beefed up their privacy settings to match Google.
Regarding the "Real Names" policy, I think that their goal there was to make it a community of Real People, instead of a completely anonymous community of people using cryptic usernames. And I think that they thought that people would be more likely to make connections if people saw each other's real names instead of some username they came up with. When they realized that some people only go by a username and that most of their friends don't even know their real name, they started allowing people to add their nickname to their profile so that they could be findable with both their real name and their username. I think that these decisions were good ones and I like the community that now exists because of those policies.
I agree that "Real Names" has privacy concerns, but before the policy change yesterday, Google+ had been saying that you didn't have to use your actual name if you were concerned about your privacy - you could just use any name that resembled an real name (i.e., John Smith). I agree that this is a bit wonky, but I think it was one of those hard tradeoffs. I think without such a policy, growth on Google+ would have been a lot slower, and the community would look very different.
I think Google cares about privacy in the abstract, but I'm concerned that there are some fundamental mismatches between what Google considers acceptable disclosure and what I consider acceptable disclosure. I don't really understand why a "real enough" name like John Smith or something would be consistent with what they said again and again was the goal of the "real names" policy, which was that they wanted you to have a reputation to maintain so people wouldn't "act out" online. What you're saying is that they just wanted you to have western-style names, and that's all that matters?
In any case, Google Plus perfectly shows what I'm talking about, because it has had serious mission creep since the beginning. If they want to have some community where everyone is forced to use their real names, fine, I'll never join that community because it's not something that interests me. What happened then was that they became downright aggressive in trying to get people to join Google Plus by making it part of the "unified" platform with "one sign in" (and no control over what you're signed in to, mind you). Now your android reviews are all on your Google Plus account, so if you want to review an app you downloaded, you have to join their forced little "community". It's heartening that after Google Buzz they've mostly been preserving some forward secrecy (i.e. "from now on all your comments will be with your real name, stop commenting if you don't like it"), but it's clear that they're deliberately making these "tradeoffs" for you, and they clearly just don't have a corporate mindset that cares about what many people care about, so I'm deeply concerned that they'll make some serious mistakes in the future just because they don't understand what people outside their culture care about, and they don't mind taking unilateral action.
Everyone (including Google[0]) agrees that they made privacy mistakes with Google Buzz. And I think that they've worked hard to improve privacy in their products since then. That's why Google+ has used circles from the beginning: the Google+ experience emphasizes choosing the right people to share you content with (as opposed to the standard "share with the public" or "share with all my friends" which was standard at the time). At the time when Google+ launched, it had one of the strongest sets of privacy settings on the market[1]. Other competitors have since beefed up their privacy settings to match Google.
Regarding the "Real Names" policy, I think that their goal there was to make it a community of Real People, instead of a completely anonymous community of people using cryptic usernames. And I think that they thought that people would be more likely to make connections if people saw each other's real names instead of some username they came up with. When they realized that some people only go by a username and that most of their friends don't even know their real name, they started allowing people to add their nickname to their profile so that they could be findable with both their real name and their username. I think that these decisions were good ones and I like the community that now exists because of those policies.
I agree that "Real Names" has privacy concerns, but before the policy change yesterday, Google+ had been saying that you didn't have to use your actual name if you were concerned about your privacy - you could just use any name that resembled an real name (i.e., John Smith). I agree that this is a bit wonky, but I think it was one of those hard tradeoffs. I think without such a policy, growth on Google+ would have been a lot slower, and the community would look very different.
[0]: http://gmailblog.blogspot.ca/2010/02/new-buzz-start-up-exper...
[1]: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/privacy-isnt-dead-j...