On Google+, all you need to do is to create a circle for business and one for friends to separate the news stream for those groups.

I have not really seen many privacy related posts yet. This was actually one of the first things I did after signing in for the first time and creating a few sample circles.

If you are in a hurry, skip the following part and go right to Google+ Privacy in a minute or less at the end of the guide.

Google+ Privacy

Cick on your name in the upper right corner of the screen and select Account Settings from the context menu. Switch to Google+ to access the notification preferences.

All notifications are enabled by default and usually linked to the primary email address of the Google+ user. I suggest you look at the notification settings and modify them according to your needs. If you do not want to receive notifications at all, disable everything on that screen.

Once you are done switch to the Profile and privacy tab where all privacy related settings are found. The page links to a lot of subpages which makes configuration a lot harder than it should be.

The first thing that you may want to do is to click on the Edit visibility on profile button near the top to modify the public profile information.

This loads your Google profile in edit mode. Just click on an entry that you want to check. Do not want your circles to appear on your public profile? Click there and modify the settings accordingly. You can disable showing of your circles completely or hide only some circles from the public Google profile.

The icons in front of each entry indicate that item’s visibility:

A ball indicates that the item is visible to everyone, a circle that it is only visible to the user’s circle, and a link icon that it is visible to the extended circle (aka friends of friends on Facebook).

Once you are done editing go back to the Profile and Privacy settings.

Sharing lists a second group on the page. It actually does not offer that many configuration settings but links to certain features of Google+

The sharing defaults are set to the following according to Google:

Each time you post content, you specify the circles and individuals you want to share it with. For convenience, new posts default to the last set of people you shared a post with, but you can change that before you post.

Each post lists an indicator that is summarizing who that post is shared with.

Manage circles leads to the circle management window where you can create, edit and delete circles and move contacts around.

Edit Network Visibility opens the profile editor once more where you can edit the public display of your circles and users who have added you to their circles.

View incoming posts opens all incoming messages of users who have added you to their circles but who are not in yours.

Google+ is the third group under Privacy settings. Here you can configure photo tagging settings and configure your interests.

Edit photo settings loads the Google+ notification settings again which we have accessed at the very beginning. You can modify photo related tagging settings at the very bottom of the screen.

Sparks lets you select activities, news or items that you are interested in.

The last group on the screen Google Privacy links to Google account related privacy settings.

All privacy settings of Google+ are handled more or less on two screens. The different links on the Profile and Privacy configuration page is somewhat confusing.

Google+ Privacy in a minute or less

Here is what you need to do to configure your Google+ privacy settings in less than a minute.

Click on your name and select privacy from the context menu. On the Profile and privacy page click on Edit visibility on profile and change visibility settings for the items on the screen. Once you are done click on your name again and Privacy.

Switch to Google+ on the left sidebar and modify the tagging and notification preferences on that screen.

Et voila, you have successfully configured your Google+ privacy settings.

Posting Status Updates

When you post a status update you are asked to add circles or people that you want to share that update with. The settings here define who is able to see your status update. It is therefor important to make the right selection on that screen.

Have anything to add? Let me know in the comments. You can also post if you want me to try the “invite trick” to get you invited into Google+ (please note that it is not working all the time though).

Benjamin Edelman, an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School, recently analysed the toolbar behavior both in enabled and disabled state and came to some astonishing results.

The Google Toolbar can be disabled easily by clicking on the x in the toolbar. This displays an option to disable the toolbar for the active window or completely. Both deactivation options hid the toolbar from the web browser’s interface but did not stop the data transmission to Google servers.

Several short screencasts of the findings were created by Mr. Edelman which are linked in the article describing that privacy issue.

We conducted a test with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and the Google Toolbar and did not come to the same conclusion. No data was submitted to Google servers after deactivating the toolbar. It is not clear why data was transferred in Mr. Edelman’s study and no data was transferred in our own. It would be nice if some of you would test the findings so that we can collect more data and come to a conclusion.

We have used a trial version of HTTP Debugger for the test with Google’s Toolbar and Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.

A recent post at Google’s Privacy blog explains Google’s approach to privacy in the form a presentation that lists the data that is collected by various Google services and how that data is used by Google to improve their services.

Data that is stored by Google is divided into the three groups log data, account data and other information. Log data is stored when users who are not logged into a Google account perform searches or use the Google Chrome browser. Account data is stored when logged in users use services like Gmail or Picasa.

Other information logs are stored when users access services like Google Maps.

Google exemplifies that with the data that is logged in Google Search.

The first slide displays the data that Google stores for every search that is performed on their website. This includes the IP address of the user, data and time the search was performed and a cookie ID.

The second slide provides a detailed look at the cookie which uses two randomly assigned ID numbers. The same slides explains that Google stores IP address information for nine months and cookie information for 18 months.

The remaining slides explain the purpose of those logs which basically comes down to improving search results and other services.

Take a look at the presentation below for the full picture:

It boils down to the following for Google Search. Google can track a single user for up to 18 months providing that the cookies are not cleared in that time. These logs can contain several IP addresses, dates, times and search queries conducted by a single user.

It would be possible to merge that data with data gathered from Google accounts which could theoretically be used to identify a user based on those information (think emails in Gmail that often contain the full name of a user).

What’s your opinion (and possible precautions) on the matter? (Google Privacy Blog via Download Squad)

But doing can also refer to performing a search on a search engine, writing an email, viewing a video or accessing information about something in a news post. Google has the means to connect those dots to create a detailed user profile which is filled with additional details for every Google service that the user access and uses.

One reaction to the video caused a huge media response. Asa Dotzler, a community coordinator at Mozilla, posted his thoughts about the expression on his personal blog which did include a link to add Bing as a search engine in Mozilla Firefox. So, Asa, recommends Bing over Google because they “have a better privacy policy”. Many news sites turned this into “Mozilla Recommends Microsoft Bing instead of Google which apparently is not exactly true.

The hypocrisy in Schmidt’s statement was revealed by Gawker who mentioned that Mr. Schmidt “blacklisted CNET reporters from Google after the tech news company published an article with information about his salary, neighborhood, hobbies, and political donations — all obtained from Google searches”.

The excellent EFF article on the matter highlights the error in logic:

We have an unfortunate tendency to conflate personal and private with secret and we say, “Well, given that this information isn’t a secret, given that it’s known by other people, how can you say that it’s private?” And we can in fact say that there are a lot of things that are [not] in secret that are in private. Every one of us does something private and not secret when we go to the bathroom. Every one of us has parents who did at least one private thing that’s not a secret, otherwise we wouldn’t be here.

So this decision — this determination — over when and under what circumstances your personal information is divulged tracks very closely to how free and how much power you have in a society. When you look at really stratified societies, particularly the great totalitarian empires of the last century, the further up the ladder you go, the more raw power you wield, the more raw power you have over this disclosure of your personal information. And the further down the ladder you go, the less power you have.

Did you follow the story on the news? What’s your take?

A lot of information are displayed in Google Dashboard many with links to the services to look and manage the information. It is likely that a lot of Google users will be surprised at the wealth of information that are displayed in Google Dashboard.

Probably even more useful than the display of the data are links to various privacy policies and options to clear or manage the data that gets stored in the accounts. It is for example possible to use a link to remove items or clear the web history, manage privacy settings in Orkut or Google Reader, manage Gmail https settings or manage Blogger blogs.

In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their own data, we’ve built the Google Dashboard. Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings. Today, the Dashboard covers more than 20 products and services, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Web History, Orkut, YouTube, Picasa, Talk, Reader, Alerts, Latitude and many more. The scale and level of detail of the Dashboard is unprecedented, and we’re delighted to be the first Internet company to offer this — and we hope it will become the standard. Watch this quick video to learn more and then try it out for yourself at www.google.com/dashboard.

Google Dashboard is definitely an interesting concept to manage many privacy related tasks from one central interface. Users who want to try it out to see the data that is stored in their Google account can visit the Google Dashboard website directly. (via official Google Blog and Connected Internet.

It was not transparent which data was transferred to Google servers while running Google Updater; And as the software was running in the background all the time it was probably the major concern that was voiced by users and privacy advocates. Google would not be Google if they could not come up with a solution to those privacy concerns: Their solution was to make Google Updater Open Source so that anyone (well not really anyone but those with the skill and knowledge to do so) could analyse the source in detail to find out about the data connections of the application. Google Updater was released with the codename Omaha at Google Code where it can be publicly downloaded.

Users who are interested in removal instructions can take a look at our article about removing Google Update on the Windows operating system.

It is a known fact that Google is collecting a massive amount of data. The main part stems from searches conducted on the search engine but other tools like the Google Toolbar add to that. Google on the other hand did not release a software until now that became such a center of criticism. Privacy advocates focused their criticism on two aspects of the Google Chrome browser.

The first was the unique user Id that was generated which could theoretically identify a user. The second that everything that was entered in the browser’s address bar was transmitted to Google even if the user never submitted the text to the search engine.

Several minor objections have come to light in the past week and software developers started to develop solutions that would eliminate identification and data transfers unless they were necessary.

Iron (vie Download Squad) was developed from the Open Source browser Chromium. That’s something that Google did encourage and the developers were the first to provide a version of Chromium that was stripped down of all known data collection and privacy problems: The client-ID, timestamp, suggest functionality, alternate error pages, error reporting, rlz-tracking, google updater and url tracker have been removed.

The functionality on the other hand remains the same. The only problem that could arise is if developers cannot keep up with the development pace of the Chromium browser. As of now this is the recommended release for users with privacy concerns.