Originally Posted by
gooselee
About a 1 year old Lenovo running Win7. 3.2GHz/4GB.
I've tried Chrome (my primary browser), IE, and Firefox to no avail. Most of the time I get the gray screen with "Google" and the three dots in the middle, the search box, and the black menu bar across the top, but it never gets past there to load an actual map.
I rather enjoy the old Maps anyway, so I'm clinging on to that for now.
Do you use Gmail, Maps, or any other Google product/service? I'm relatively sure that if they truly wanted to, they can and do still capture user information for folks not using G+.
I'm with you that I have no use for G+ and it seems like a bit of a hassle (especially with the big push to integrate everything into it), but I just registered the account anyway and put in nothing more than my name and city (and maybe birth year). That's all information that Google has about me anyway via Gmail and Android, so even if they did want to share it, it's not like they have anything extra just because of G+.
One thing really bothers me about how Google exposes Google+ information: they expose my name next to formerly-anonymous Google reviews for places in their maps. I've spent a little time trying to undo that to no avail. It seems the only way to get rid of them is to delete your Google+ account, and even then, Google only says it will try to eliminate them.
The same thing applies to new reviews in the Google Play market. I don't review apps there anymore because of that.