Google+ Profile Privacy Settings
This evening I took the plunge into Google+, the latest and greatest social networking site that has received mostly positive reviews and has the potential to shake things up in this Facebook-dominated world. I noticed that there are a few Google+ Profile settings that the privacy-conscious user might want to tweak. To edit your Google Profile, which is also the profile used by Google+, click the Profile button on the top of Google+:
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| After clicking Profile, click the Edit Profile button on the top right |
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| Google+ Profile Circles settings |
Circles
On Google+ your friends are organized into "circles." I don't know about you, but I'd rather keep my friends list private ("Guess who's back
in the Circle of Trust?"). Not that I have shady friends or anything, I'd just rather not broadcast that out to the whole world. While editing your profile, click the Circles box on the left where you will see the option to un-check "Show people in my circles," or change from the default option "Anyone on the web." (Tsk tsk, Google!)
Photos
I've used Picasa Web Albums for a few years and I pay $20/year for 80GB of storage to archive my photos online via the Picasa application. Picasa Web Albums is tremendously convenient, affordable, and easy for sharing family photos with family and friends on my own terms without compromising privacy (assuming you assign the proper sharing permissions). Unfortunately, when you sign up with Google+, you are strong-armed into linking your Picasa Web Albums with your Google+ profile. So while you're editing your Google+ profile, click on the Photos tab. Yep, that's right, the default is to show all of your public albums in a nice, convenient little tab viewable by anyone on the web (including your profile pictures). I take quite a drastic approach here and I simply un-check the option "Show this tab on your profile" (although the public albums are still accessible via Picasa Web Albums):
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| I prefer to be stingy with my photos, thank you very much! |
After joining Google+, I visited Picasa Web Albums and saw
this notice:
When you tag someone in a Picasa Web Album, it
automatically shares the album with that person on Google+, and those folks can then reshare your album. So, only tag photos if you're ready to release them out into the world (hopefully we'll see a feature to turn this off).
Continued on the next page
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