One big emphasis with Google+ is on privacy. The company is adamant in not repeating the mistakes it made before, with Google Buzz for example, and also is also trying to create an image for the new social network as a place that puts privacy first, as opposed to Facebook, of course.
For the most part, it worked; people praised the focus on privacy and the more inherently intimate feel of the social network. One big part of this is the use of circles, everything you share or say stays within the circle of friends you want it to.
That's the theory, at least, it seems that in practice it's very easy for the things you say or photos you share with your family to end up being seen by a lot more people and possibly the world, via the reshare feature, as the Financial Times
noted.
By default, anything you post in a circle can be reshared by your friends, meaning that it will become available to the members of their circles, people you may not even know. What's more, they could decide to reshare your stuff in public.
That's a rather glaring omission which makes all of Google's work on privacy moot. The problem is worse since, at the moment, there is no way of disabling resharing from the settings and people may not even be aware of how this works anyway.
But Google has acknowledged the issue and said that this is exactly why it wanted to get some real-world feedback with only a few users. Google+ is still in a very limited trial period and it's far from being ready for a massive roll-out.
This is why Google's approach this time around, a limited number of early adopter users, is the right one. It's doubtless that issues like this will pop up over the coming weeks, but Google should be listening to its users so by the time more people get in, the biggest problems should be fixed.
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