Perhaps Google wants to optimize for the usual case where people don't mind sharing the list of people they are following, which is parity with Twitter and Facebook.
It's an unexpected change for me at least, because I've posted on blogspot blogs in the past from my Google account, which makes the comments link to your Google profile if you have one. I expected that the result would be (and it was) a pseudonymous comment with just my first name, which linked to a blank Google profile. If Google sticks my real name and my friends lists on my Google profile without warning, those old comments are retroactively linked to my IRL identity, which wasn't what I expected when I posted them years ago.
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Perhaps Google wants to optimize for the usual case where people don't mind sharing the list of people they are following, which is parity with Twitter and Facebook.
It's an unexpected change for me at least, because I've posted on blogspot blogs in the past from my Google account, which makes the comments link to your Google profile if you have one. I expected that the result would be (and it was) a pseudonymous comment with just my first name, which linked to a blank Google profile. If Google sticks my real name and my friends lists on my Google profile without warning, those old comments are retroactively linked to my IRL identity, which wasn't what I expected when I posted them years ago.