Google's Unified Online Identity Crisis

Google can't explain its privacy features properly, so why would it explain why unified online identity is a good thing?

It's more complicated than that. As I've pointed out before, Google can't really lay out why it needs to streamline identity. To do so would be to acknowledge it requires a larger digital dossier on people.

My problem with this is that there is no evidence that suggests SPYW or any of the other social functionality makes Google services better. That's the challenge therein; for a company so reliant on algorithms and math, it can't accurately the impact of social. 

So saying trust us, SPYW will make us better for you isn't really comforting to people. Hell, most people don't even know what Google is doing anyway. The ones that pay attention do, and those are the people that are smart enough to know Google is bullshitting them.