Google is kicking off 2014 with some good old-fashioned privacy infringement. The search giant’s recent decision to link Gmail addresses to Google+ was met with considerable backlash among users who don’t want their inboxes exposed to spam. But according to former Tumblr lead developer Marco Arment on his blog , we really shouldn’t be surprised at all:

To be clear, for anyone who thinks Google is some benevolent, selfless entity handing out free services to everyone out of the goodness of its heart: Google’s leadership, threatened by the attention and advertising relevance of Facebook, is betting the company on Google+ at all costs.

To that end, writes Arment, Google will do anything up to and including angering the users of its core products and services if that meant propping up Google+ against Facebook’s overwhelming dominance. But Arment may be missing the forest for the trees in his particular case against Google.

In a 2012 article for TechCrunch, writer Josh Constine argued that Google stopped caring about whether or not people used Google+ fairly early on. What mattered instead was that people were simply on it.

Google scrambled to build Google+ because it watched Facebook and saw users were willing to volunteer biographical data to their social network, and that data is crucial to serving accurate ads users want to click. Search keywords and algorithmic analysis of your Gmail and other content weren’t enough.

For all intents and purposes, Constine’s argument holds up in 2014. Allowing people to reach you via Google+ doesn’t necessarily mean users will engage with it any more–they’re not suddenly going to start posting content or leaving Facebook in droves. Perhaps instead it serves as another method for Google to nail down a clearer picture of who you are, pin you to a single account, wrapped neatly and tied with a bow.

But even though Arment may be off the mark as to why Google made such a move, he’s very right when he addresses the problem in our collective reaction. We’re still actively talking about Google in light of their old mantra: “Don’t be evil.”

We need to stop. Immediately.

In fact, the notion of what is meant by that phrase has always been a slippery one when used in discussion about Google, but to Google itself, what constitutes as “evil” has always been clear: Evil is what Google says it is.