The author seems perplexed that Motorola is not collecting information from Google or Gmail accounts. This is probably because they already have the information: remember that Motorola is owned by Google.
That theory makes no sense. This phone predates the Google purchase by over a year (and there were probably other phones with the same software even earlier). Also, Google has no plausible use at all for any of this data and misusing it would have huge PR and legal risks. Certainly most of Motoblur got trimmed out with the upgrade to 4.0, and from what I hear completely eliminated with 4.1. Just didn't matter for this phone, since it got stuck on 2.3.
It's pure engineering incompetence from Motorola, not a nefarious way to collect data.
That's the date when Google announced that they were intending to buy Motorola, but such an announcement is irrelevant. Until the deal closes, the companies are legally obligated to continue behaving as if nothing has changed. For example in this case there were anti-trust issues in at least China and the US.
