Google+ Receives An A+ For Privacy Controls

The last year has seen concerns over privacy on Facebook rise to new heights. Every new feature seems to be designed to automatically share more user information, on an opt-out basis, and the controls that let users opt out of services they never wanted to be a part of are buried under layer after layer confusing menus. It’s a maze designed to let Facebook say their users have total control over what gets shared, while in practice leaving them with few options unless they’re willing to abandon the world’s most popular social network entirely.

Now that I’ve finally had a chance to look at Google+ from the inside, it’s more apparent than ever that Google sees privacy as the way to make itself different form Facebook. The new service is designed from the ground up to give you all the controls its older competitor hides from you.

On Facebook, we all got used to the idea that you can type whatever you want, but it’s out in the world for all your friends to see after you click share. You could narrow that down by sharing within a group or with a Friends List, but many users never go to the trouble of creating either, because the process is deliberately inconvenient.

Google+ solves this problem using Circles. As far as I can tell, you can’t add someone to your list of contacts on Google+ without putting them in a Circle. And adding them to a Circle (or several of them) is as easy as inviting a new Facebook friend ever was. When it comes time to share, you’re presented with one box to type in and a second box prompting you to put in who you want to share with. If you don’t pick which people or Circles receive the message, it doesn’t share with anyone. This is a default behavior designed to let users share with as many or few people as they want, and it’s no harder to share with one person or group than it is to share with everyone you know.

Google+ takes even more steps in giving you control over your privacy. When you add anyone to your Circles, they and anyone in their Circles (what Google+ calls your “Extended Circle”) can see your Profile. That’s a bit more exposure than I’d really be comfortable with, except for the way Google+ handles editing your Profile. With the exception of your name, profile photo, and gender (which Google Profiles have always made public), you can change the privacy settings for every field in your profile individually, right there in the same box as where you put the information into the system. You can share some things with the whole internet, others with your Extended Circle, some with all of your own Circles, and even create custom settings that show pieces of your profile only to specific Circles or individuals.

Google+ is even trying to prevent accidental oversharing. A friend of mine tried to share a photo in a Hangout this morning by copying a link. It didn’t work. No one in the chat could access the page, because the photo was on Google+, and he hadn’t given any of us explicit permission to view it. While Google+ won’t prevent your friends from re-sharing things more widely than you intended, it does give a polite little reminder to them that they should be thoughtful when sharing the private information of others.

The most telling privacy feature of Google+ is the way it organizes all your general privacy settings into a single page. Go to Google+ settings and one of the tabs on the left is called Profile and Privacy. This page alone is the antithesis of everything Facebook has done with its privacy settings. Any privacy setting you could ever want to change in Google+ is located on this page or clearly and explicitly linked to from it. No hunting around for the right branch in an endless sea of options. Everything from Profile to Photos to who can share posts with you is right in one place.

It’s still early to say whether privacy is enough of a concern to draw the average user away from Facebook with these features, but one thing is for certain. Any user who is dissatisfied with the casual way Facebook treats privacy now has a place where they can feel a lot more comfortable.