[roundsquare]

I suppose I should be clear from this point on: I am against Google+ forcing people to show their gender.

"Well... that's the point. I really don't want to talk about it as an ethical decision, and I guess I can avoid that by pointing out that it is more obviously a good business decision."

In this case, I don't like making it a business decision for two reasons:

1) It is all but certain that Google considered the business repercussions of forcing people to show their gender. They almost certainly balanced the number of people they would not be able to get against the fact that the data is not indexed and searchable and concluded that, from a business point of view, it was worthwhile to force people to show gender. In the end, without real data, there is probably not a good way to make the business argument in a way that convinces google that they are wrong from a business point of view. (Of course, while testing, if the data they gather says that this is killing their business, they'll probably change the way it works).

2) If we can make the moral argument, and Google busy it, they are less likely to start changing their default privacy settings, etc... on people just because its good business.

Of course, I realize there is strength in making something a business decision. It means that even if they don't buy the moral argument, we still get the outcome we want. But, in this case, I think the two reasons stated above outweigh this (especially point number 2 given the experience with facebook).

I'm having some trouble connecting your last few paragraphs ("An conception of the idea..." onward), which are very general in nature, to the specific topic here. As far as I can tell, you are basically arguing for some sort of rules based morality. Without getting into if that's desirable or not (though in many cases, I agree it is), its not clear to me what rules you are in favor of. Please do explain...

(On your moral argument and discussion of perceived risk, I essentially agree).