Is Google Reader Oversharing?
I thought this was useful, but that's because I thought the old method of sharing was too clunky, and I never used it. Google probably thought the same thing. But apparently lots of other folks used the share feature to share items with a select list of people and were upset to find that anyone they'd ever instant messaged on Google Talk would suddenly find their shared items.
I'm finding posts about this on tons of forums and blogs, and every time I read it, the story seems to have gotten worse. It probably stems from this Slashdot article claiming that Google is sharing private data will all your Gmail contacts.
I think this is a bit of a stretch to call it private data. Ok, public blog posts, news items, and other articles that you've specifically marked as shared are now visible to a larger audience than you may have intended. They were always publicly visible before, just obscure and less likely to be found.
The change is annoying and may have some unintended consequences if you have people on your Google Talk list that you'd rather keep at arm's length, like an ex-husband. It's more like finding out the link to your MySpace page is in an email to your boss than it is like finding out your phone conversations have been wiretapped.
Should Google make the controls more granular? Certainly. I'm really not sure why they didn't think about this before the feature was introduced. Google Docs has fairly nice sharing options. Why not go with a model like that? Given the controversy, I'd say Google should turn sharing off until they do have more granular controls.
Meanwhile, if you've found that Google Reader is oversharing your feeds, you can clear them all using these instructions from Google.
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