No it didn't, it might have been created when you joined something that required it and there was a check mark somewhere, it gets populated by stuff that you added when you started Google account like date of birth etc, but you get presented with that as well.
I'm the kind of person that explores all menu options and such in software to make sure it doesn't run/install anything I don't want. When signing up for services online, I go through all the settings. I even occasionally go through my Gmail settings to make sure nothing has changed.
Maybe it was "designed" to give me an option, but I never had an option. Gmail isn't bug-free either. Over the years I've run into a few bugs. Occasionally the link for the inbox shows I have unread mail, but there is none. I'm able to fix it by doing a search for unread mail, and the link changes showing that I don't have any unread mail.
> I even occasionally go through my Gmail settings to make sure nothing has changed.
Yeesh. It's stuff like this that makes me glad I run my own mail/CalDAV/CardDAV server, and am thus free to use throwaway accounts for all of my interaction with Google.
I wonder if there'd be any interest in an old-fashioned HOWTO that starts with a freshly imaged VPS and goes through the whole setup process. It's been a few years since I set everything up, but I've been planning to redo it on a fresh box anyway, and writing the HOWTO wouldn't add much effort.
I think that's a good idea. I know I'll be looking for some examples in a couple of months when I have enough time to dedicate setting one up properly.
You may or may not have seen it already, but in case you haven't, I'll link here the "How to NSA-proof your email" howto [1] someone just posted in the "Gmail was down" thread. Regardless of how you feel about the Black Chamber, it's an excellently well-written document on setting up your own mail-serving VPS using postfix and dovecot; the filesystem-level encryption stuff is trivially severable, and constitutes about 80% of what I'd have written (but not as well) had I not found this first. The other 20% would be setting up Baïkal for CalDAV/CardDAV service, but that's pretty straightforward and well described in the Baïkal Github repo.
(Minor quibbles about the HOWTO: I'm not sure Solr is really necessary; Dovecot seems to give me full-text search for free via IMAP. Also, I tried Z-push and it worked, but didn't support message flags, which I require, and I got tired of push pretty fast anyway. It works, and might've added message flags in the years since I tried it, but it's by no means required. Still, an excellent document, which I unreservedly recommend.)
Actually, when I created a disposable gmail account a couple of years ago, it came with google plus already active. I deleted that part, of course, but I never signed up for it.
I love the implication that having something auto-opt you into something and then doing it is the same thing as voluntarily doing it. Like we're supposed to be ok with the companies we do business with behaving like evil genies.
I doesn’t just get created on its own.