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You don't need a G+ profile for Gmail.

I thought you needed to sign up for Gmail and Google+ if you want a Google account now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3489266 But actually, there's a way to get a Gmail account without Google+ http://mail.google.com/mail/signup and a way to get a Google account without Gmail or Google+ https://accounts.google.com/NewAccount if you know the URLs.

You don't need to know any special URLs either. All you have to do is stop the signup process after your Gmail account is created (step 1) but before you create your Google+ profile (step 2).

To be fair probably 99% of people going through the sign-up flow won't realize this.

Then Google will be happy to tell us users don't care about privacy:

> The vast majority of users sail through our signup process -- in fact, only about 0.1% submit name appeals.

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