A big part of Google’s pitch for its new social networking service is that it’s easier for users to manage who sees what they post on the site.
Privacy has never been a strong suit for either Facebook or Google, but the Circles feature on Google+ is a simpler way to categorise groups of friends than is available on Facebook. Users are given the option of which Circles of contacts to share a piece of content with, each and every time they post something. Google has today been able to bathe in the rare warmth of widespread praise for its approach to privacy.
But this is a beta and there are going to be bugs. One appears to be in Google+’s “resharing” feature, which works a little like a retweet on Twitter or reblogging on Tumblr.
While it’s not a privacy error on the scale of Google Buzz, which (notoriously) assumed friendships between email contacts that in at least one case included someone’s abusive ex-partner, it’s a little disheartening to discover that “resharing” can, in two clicks, blow a hole in these little circles of trust.
Say a close friend of mine posts a picture of her kids to her “friends” Circle. With the “share” option on every Google+ post, I can reshare this with absolutely anyone, from another Circle to which my friend does not belong, right through to making it completely public. The same loophole applies not just to photos but to any kind of post, as far as I can tell.
If she’d known about this risk (and how would she?), my friend could have disabled resharing using the drop-down menu on the right-hand side of every post, but it doesn’t seem to be possible to do this before she’d already published it. Google+ also, for now, lacks any way to turn off resharing of all your posts from within its privacy settings.
Personal pictures, posts and location check-ins could quickly leak into the public domain this way. The Google+ equivalent of the newsfeed updates in realtime and doing most things on the service requires admirably few clicks. These are very good attributes for a new site that’s seeking to win people over through ease of use.
But it could also lead to resharing without giving a second thought to the light-grey text that indicates a post is “limited”.
I have passed this feedback on to Google, which acknowledged the loophole. (UPDATE: Google has now posted details of its fix for the problem.)
It says that this is exactly the kind of issue it hopes to identify and resolve while Google+ is still in “field trial” mode. Its userbase remains very limited, for now, with invites thin on the ground. Testers are in the early-adopter crowd who can probably live with this kind of thing before Google adds a way to disable any resharing by default.
It’s also entirely possible that within Facebook’s labyrinthine privacy settings, this sort of re-publishing can occur through a Like, though I don’t have a clear picture on that.
But mentioning this to non-geek friends who aren’t using the service, they were a bit startled by the prospect. And for me, it throws a light on a tension that lurks within Google+ just as much as Facebook.
Several settings in Google+ tend towards being public by default, right from the sign-up screen, where “personalising” search results and ads is ticked as standard, requiring you to opt out of what some would call “targeting”. It also defaults to making all of your friendships public to anybody on the web.
Social services thrive on sharing, and tight privacy controls tend to inhibit that. Google must balance its need to make up years of lost time in social networking with the need to preserve one of Google+’s best selling points.
