This guide will take you through setting up Google+'s circles with an emphasis on how they work from a privacy perspective, how to control what others can see about you on your profile, your options for selectively sharing posts with others, and some miscellaneous settings you'll want to tweak—like only allowing friends to start Huddles with you. A note on pseudonymity: Google has taken a strong and, I think, awfully mistaken stance on not allowing people to use Google+ with a pseudonym. While this is definitely a privacy issue, it falls outside of this post's purpose of explaining how to use Google+'s privacy settings. Kee Hinckley, a Consulting CTO for Somewhere.com and Lead Architect at Zinc.tv, has written a compelling and thorough post on the subject, and hopefully Google is listening and will rectify this issue. Let's go tackle your main Google+ privacy settings and options: 1. Privacy and Your Circles
Things you need to know:
Differences between Google+ circles and Twitter followers or Facebook friendsLots of people like how intuitive and basic using circles is. It's much more upfront and clearer that Facebook's friends lists (which offer useful way to control your Facebook privacy), but there are also some intricacies to keep in mind about how circles work, especially if you're used to how Twitter and Facebook work:
So, on the one hand, Google+'s circles are much simpler to set up and use because they form the basis of this social networking model. On the other, it's like a mishmash of other social networks, so it might be confusing at first. Although anyone can follow you or add you to their circles, the important thing to remember is that the privacy of your posts is always set by you (more on this below). Google+ has many controls for allowing who can see your profile information and also who can see each individual post. 2. Control What People Know About You From Your Profile
Here are the default settings for your profile information:
So, for example, you can set your introduction to be for anyone on the web, your employment to be visible to anyone you've added to your circles, your contact information to be visible to a custom selection of circles such as friends and family, and your relationship status to be only for you and your significant other to see.
Search visibility. If you don't want your profile to be indexed by Google and it to appear in search results, this is the setting to look for. It's at the bottom of your Profile on the About page. Uncheck "Help others find my profile in search results," which is checked by default.
You have options to make the world think you're only following a select group or groups of people—excluding other groups from their view or hiding all the people you follow, in fact. And you can hide everyone who's added you to their circles, so no one would know how many people or which people are following you. Profile photos, email, links. The other sections of the profile page are customizable too: your main photo and series of profile photos, that "send an email" link, and your web links. By default, everyone on the web can see these. If this bothers you, here's where you can change it. PhotosProfile photos, shared albums from Picasa, photos of you tagged by other Google+ users, and Instant Upload photos all appear here. You can choose not show this tab (it's displayed by default), but even if your photos tab is displayed, only those photos that you share with others will appear here to them. A strange setting for "People whose tags of you are automatically approved to link to your Profile" is set by default to be allowed for your circles. This setting just means if someone tags you in a photo and you approve it, the photo will be linked to your profile and added here. Geo-location is not added by default, nor are photos uploaded by the Instant Upload feature of the Google+ Android app. VideosThis section only has the option to hide or show the tab. You'll need to explicitly share videos here, but the tab is shown by default. +1'sWhen you like a page or website by clicking on the +1 button in the search results or on the site, it will show up on your profile page if you have this set to be shared by default. (Note: clicking +1 on comments on a post or stream will not show up on this tab. It will only be shown on that thread.) If you don't want people to see your +1's, uncheck this tab (but this begs the question of why you would click any +1 buttons.) 3. Share Only to Select People Using CirclesAfter organizing people into groups for sharing and adjusting our profile settings, the next major privacy concern is controlling who can see and share the content you post (which can include a photo, web link, video, and/or map/location).
Notes about selecting groups you share with:
4. Control Your Information Streams and Posts
Incoming streams. Posts from people you've added to your circles will appear in your "stream" under their various circle categories. For people you haven't added to your circles but who are following you, their posts will be shared with you under the "Incoming" link. You can mute posts you're not interested in seeing there (more trouble than it's worth, probably) or add some of those people to your circles. Blocking people. If there are too many spammy or offensive or just overwhelming posts from some people, you can block them in your circles settings. "Block" here, however, may not work as you might think. As Hinckley describes it:
In other words, don't think of blocking a user as actually protecting your privacy. Your comments on others' posts are public: Note that your comments on other people's threads, if those threads are shared publicly, are public too and indexed by Google (i.e., searchable). Your +1's of any other people's posts are public too, so that's another thing to be mindful of. An individual post will say "Limited" or "Public" next to the timestamp, so you'll have some idea whether it's shared with a circle or with the public at large. 5. Check Other Obscure Privacy Options and Settings
At the bottom you can change the default of anyone being able to start a Huddle (group text) with you. (This can be really annoying, as Adam Pash can tell you.) Your Profile and Privacy tab links to most of the other settings we've already mentioned. It's a convenient one-stop page to jump to all the settings, perhaps, as well as to your main Google Account information and Google's Privacy Center. One nice thing you don't have to worry about is data retention and an encrypted connection. Google has confirmed Google+ uses only an encrypted SSL connection and that the data you delete from Google+ is deleted from their servers. A Wish ListAs a new service, Google+ has a lot of promise and Google has been responsive so far to many privacy concerns. The privacy controls for the most part are very straightforward, and Google's continuing to tweak them. For example, recently they changed the chat feature in Google+ so that you need to explicitly invite people for them to appear in your chat list (and Google says they're working on removing the restriction of all users in your chat list having access to your email address). There are still lots of usability and privacy features we'd like to see added to Google+, as evidenced by the many extensions available for making the most of the service and a recent discussion on Google+ privacy (thanks to everyone who joined in). Some of the things fellow Google+ers most wished for were: the ability to exclude specific circles or individuals from posts, adding subcircles for finer control, viewing multiple circles' streams at once, and an easier way to view comments and replies to comments in Google+. You've taken a tour of Google+'s privacy settings, but this certainly isn't the end of the discussion. So, please feel free to share your thoughts with us in the comments. |
Sunday, August 14, 2011
A Guide to Google+ Privacy and Information Control
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Google’s Keep note-taking app is getting a new feature courtesy of Android 14 that’s a huge time-saver, even if Samsung got there first
There’s a certain balance that needs to be achieved with lock screen functionality. You can’t give away too much because of, well, securit...
-
Use Companion Mode with Google Meet for hybrid learning Important: Some features, such as hand raising, require specific Google Workspace...
-
One of our regular readers was irritated at this problem of VLC Building Font Cache . Because of this problem VLC starts rebuilding the font...
No comments:
Post a Comment