To be fair, Google respects robots.txt (and the atrocious "right to be forgotten"), and they won't stop you from using GMail if you encrypt everything with PGP. Unlike others (cough-Facebook-cough), they usually don't feel the need to trick users into sharing more than they'd want. The classic "if you've done nothing wrong" attitude is more a personal opinion of certain individuals (a certain Eric Schmidt comes to mind) than intrinsic to Google culture. So I don't think you're being fair here; it's not like they actively try to distribute salary details of all other companies...
When one signs up for G+, their G+ profile (containing information about them) becomes public. It is easy to rush through the setup process, especially when one did not desire to go through it, and accidentally share more information than desired.
That's totally different, antsar. I'm 95% sure the motive for that was to simply grow the user base of G+ and try to get more people to know that the platform even exists.
That probably was the motive. But the side effect is that now people have public G+ profiles which they may not have wanted, sharing information about them (even as simple as their name and photo) that they would rather keep private.
