This used to be called "search history", and then "web history", and now "my activity". These controls for user data have been a best practice Google has been following for many years.
The Aston Kutcher use-case is more appropriate for twitter.
IMAPSN relationships are reciprocal and the target use cases involve actual friends. To avoid backlogs of status updates the relationship has statuses of asleep, neglected, and active which can affect the list of message recipients.
Friend of friend is addressed by a few constraints on comments.
"Poor / incomprehensible error messages and stack traces are far and away the most common complaint."
I wonder if this is because of the high slime usage. The slime debugger doesn't play well with java exceptions because the stack gets unwound. JSwat is the advertised debugging option--wonder how many slime users have tried it.
https://policies.google.com/technologies/retention