Google+ steers clear of privacy missteps

From CNET News.com: With the launch of a new social networking platform, Google seems determined not to repeat the privacy missteps it made last year with Google Buzz.

Public criticism, some valid, some not, prompted Google to make a series of quick changes to Buzz a few days after its launch in February 2010. Google finally settled allegations of unintentional oversharing in an agreement inked with the Federal Trade Commission earlier this year.

When creating Google+, which debuted yesterday, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company took pains to ensure there's no danger of that happening again. Google+ sports a clean, well-designed user interface that arguably offers greater privacy protections than Facebook, which has made more and more information public over time.

All posts on Google+ can be made public, turning it into a kind of high-powered, if not very customizable, blogging platform. But it's more useful when posts can be segmented by circles.

"A clear and extremely welcome difference between Google+ and Facebook is that G+ treats us as adults able to determine our own relationships and sharing preferences, in contrast to Facebook that treats us like sheep to be fleeced via pressures to overshare," wrote Lauren Weinstein of People For Internet Responsibility in, of course, a Google+ post.

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