I am new to Orkut/OpenSocial, and wanted to see if I could get some reasons why the Orkut profile requires some fields to be input in order to update or allow a profile.

The reason for this is to address privacy concerns, certainly in a situation with OpenSocial development, and I thought it makes some sense to put it out there.

There are four fields in total... First and Last name.... these are text fields and be anything, so no problem there.
The only two other fields that are required are
GENDER and country.

Perhaps someone could explain why those two fields are not optional?
Gender represents personally identifiable information and I dont think it should be required at all...
Perhaps Country has a performance implication, but that that should also be optional,IMHO... any comments?