Anyone who buys into the "G+ is a ghost town propped up by Gmail and Android numbers" theory will note that they literally just announced 500 million Android activations a few days ago. And you'd expect a good number of users are buying their second android phone.
Probably 95% of non-fork Android users create or already have a Google account at the time of activation. And probably 95% of the ones that don't end up making one because it's a requirement for the app store or gmail or whatever.
Now there's nothing wrong with that. There's not even anything wrong with defaulting G+ to "on".
What's "wrong" is to go around claiming G+ is some kind of amazing success story that's growing like wildfire. It'd be like Apple adding a new Ping checkbox to Apple id profiles that defaults to on and then claiming Ping has 400 million new users and is a runaway success.
The claim is that a Google Account is necessary for Google Play and when you sign up for a Google Account the default for G+ is on. And again I don't see anything wrong with that. But the obvious result is that this inflates the G+ numbers with people who aren't the least interested in G+ as a service. Again if Apple did this with Ping they'd be a laughingstock.
If this is true it is a huge problem that Google would be publishing user information (name, photo) to the public on an opt-out basis, violating their privacy principles.
