As a boy I made cipher wheels with paper cutouts, hiding the location of buried treasure was never so much fun.

[image courtesy of Wikipedia]

Cryptography comes from the need for privacy, and once upon a time I wrote a nice story about the privacy issues in social networking. In short: Facebook’s privacy policy was a pain to understand if you’re a legal layman like myself.

There’s probably a lot of Doublethink hidden in there.

Google+ makes this much easier!

“Privacy is not just the need for secrecy, it’s the state of being free from unsanctioned intrusion.”

The Privacy Center (via your account’s privacy settings) gives us these 5 principals for all Google’s products:

1. Use information to provide our users with valuable products and services.
2. Develop products that reflect strong privacy standards and practices.
3. Make the collection of personal information transparent.
4. Give users meaningful choices to protect their privacy.
5. Be a responsible steward of the information we hold.

These give me insight what we can hope to expect. You find there’s no real need to dissect the policy until it makes sense, it does so the first time. Transparency!

Furthermore, there is a whole section addressing family safety. Nice work Google.

The G+ Privacy Guide lays everything out in nicely categorized sections, easy to find answers.

Keep an eye out for any amendments while G+ is changing, and let’s hope there aren’t any hidden surprises.

Just a thought.