First Totally Bogus Privacy Issue Over Google+ Raised

One of the first things that struck me about Google+ was that the company appeared to be bending over backwards to make the privacy options extra clear and easy to use. It seemed like the opposite of Facebook... and even previous Google efforts, like Buzz. Clearly the privacy debacle around the launch of Buzz taught folks at Google a lesson, which they weren't going to ignore. So I was a bit surprised to see a headline claiming that there were already privacy concerns about the way Google+ worked. At first, I though that perhaps the company had missed things... but it turns out that (surprise, surprise), it looks like someone is overreacting to a basic feature:

Google's latest stab at a social network lets you categorize the people you know into different circles, so you can share with your friends what you might not want to share with your family.

The young social network, however, has a feature that lets you reshare what someone posts. By letting you reshare, the post goes beyond the circle or circles it was intended to be seen by. This loophole was first spotted by the Financial Times.

Um. That's not a privacy loophole. That's how everything on the internet works. It's how Facebook works. It's how email works. In fact, Google's setup here is even more conducive to privacy than pretty much everything else, because it actually gives you the ability to block that ability on each thing you share. I'm at a total loss to see how this is a "privacy issue." It's someone making up a privacy issue.

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Source: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110701/00262714929/first-totally-bogus-privacy-issue-over-google-raised.shtml

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