Preliminary Analysis of Google+'s Privacy

TL;DR

This paper preliminarily analyzes Google+'s privacy features, highlighting data sharing practices, user information disclosures, and comparing privacy controls with Facebook to understand privacy implications.

Contribution

It provides an initial assessment of Google+'s privacy mechanisms, including data sharing, user disclosures, and comparative analysis with Facebook.

Findings

Google+ shares photo metadata with viewers.

Google+ encourages sharing of personal identifiers like maiden names.

Google+ privacy controls are less comprehensive than Facebook's.

Abstract

In this paper we provide a preliminary analysis of Google+ privacy. We identified that Google+ shares photo metadata with users who can access the photograph and discuss its potential impact on privacy. We also identified that Google+ encourages the provision of other names including maiden name, which may help criminals performing identity theft. We show that Facebook lists are a superset of Google+ circles, both functionally and logically, even though Google+ provides a better user interface. Finally we compare the use of encryption and depth of privacy control in Google+ versus in Facebook.