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Comment by jabo | Hacker News Reader

There's one more privacy feature/annoyance with photos on Google Plus. Apparently when I share an album with someone, that person in turn can share that album with other people and can also see who else I've shared it with. Now what's the point of a private album if everyone else can share my album. I like how Facebook solves this problem. You, as the album owner get to choose who sees the album. People who you've set the visibility as true cannot see who else I've shared it with.

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Only allowing the owner to share an album is a false sense of security. If someone can see your album, they could just as easily download the photos and make them public.

Instead of disallowing it outright, I'd rather they make it clear that you're sharing content with a wider audience. One solution would be to require that the owner approves the share, similar to how tagging is handled.

They do make it clear you're sharing with a wider audience. When you click the share button, G+ tells you:

  This post was originally shared with a limited audience –
  remember to be thoughtful about who you share it with.

This is a social problem, not a technical problem. You can't stop bits being copied, but you can make people think twice before copying.

That's good idea. But it still wouldn't solve the issue of people downloading the photos and making them public.

That problem is inherent with posting something online. The best any service can do is make it difficult for someone to accidentally violate their friends' privacy.

This, in my opinion, is where Google+ is failing: sharing makes it very easy to make private posts visible to an audience larger than the author intended.

This, in my opinion, is where Google+ is failing: sharing makes it very easy to make private posts visible to an audience larger than the author intended.

In addition to G+ reminding users when resharing a limited post that it was intended for a smaller audience and to be mindful of that, the original poster can also disable resharing entirely.

That's definitely the hardest part. I figure that if people have gone to the effort of getting around that limitation when I've pretty clearly asked them not to, then it's not someone I need to be sharing with again in the future. I have at least one family member I no longer give pictures of my son to for this reason.

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