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Google+ beta flaws

June 30th, 2011 by Joseph Ruthaford

A large part of Google’s pitch for its new social networking service is that it’s easier for users to control who sees what they post on the site.
Privacy has never been a well-built suit for either Facebook or Google, but the Circles feature on Google+ is a simpler way to categorize groups of friends than is accessible on Facebook. Users are given the choice of which Circles of contacts to share a piece of content with, each and every time they post anything.
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 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 friend of mine posts a picture of his kids to hid “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 have read.
If he’d known about this risk (and how would he?), 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.
So looks like the first major bug has been found and isn’t that really what beta’s are meant to do?

Related posts:

1. Facebook taking on Google in a bad way
2. Google+: don’t worry about friends
3. Want to know what Google has been keeping track of?
4. Google plus has potential to be bigger than Facebook
5. Battle between Facebook and Google plus continue