In my experience, those most concerned with people knowing how much gold they have, have also been the ones without gold. And those with a lot of gold, for the most part, are not as pestered as one might imagine. Even them, the armory does not show such information.

As for people being able to see your talent spec, what's the big deal?

What so many people fail to see is that different people have different levels of desired privacy in their characters, this is their perception (not yours, not Blizzard's) and they have made decisions, inducing investing time and money into the game at their current levels of comfort. This change radically alters that comfort level. While you and maybe Blizzard feel that this is public information, others where under the inference that such was not the case.

Via WoW Forums