The first Google+ privacy flaw

A big part of Google’s pitch for its new social networking service is that it’s easier for users to manage who sees what they post on the site. Privacy has never been a strong suit for either Facebook or Google, but the Circles feature on Google+ is a simpler way to categorize groups of friends than is available on Facebook.

Users are given the option of which Circles of contacts to share a piece of content with, each and every time they post something. Google has today been able to bathe in the rare warmth of widespread praise for its approach to privacy. But this is a beta and there are going to be bugs. One appears to be in Google+’s “resharing” feature, which works a little like a retweet on Twitter or reblogging on Tumblr. While it’s not a privacy error on the scale of Google Buzz, which (notoriously) assumed friendships between email contacts that in at least one case included someone’s abusive ex-partner, it’s a little disheartening to discover that “resharing” can, in two clicks, blow a hole in these little circles of trust.