There has been much hullabaloo over the release of Google’s new social network and Facebook competitor Google+. The privacy in Google+ is supposed to be better since it has a feature called Circles which allows you to share information with select groups of friends. However the real privacy problem is not the sharing of information with particular groups of friends although that is a concern. The real privacy problem is who is actually storing the data. As Julian Assange stated in an interview:

Facebook in particular is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented. Here we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations and the communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US intelligence. Facebook, Google, Yahoo – all these major US organizations have built-in interfaces for US intelligence. It’s not a matter of serving a subpoena. They have an interface that they have developed for US intelligence to use. Now, is it the case that Facebook is actually run by US intelligence? No, it’s not like that. It’s simply that US intelligence is able to bring to bear legal and political pressure on them. And it’s costly for them to hand out records one by one, so they have automated the process. Everyone should understand that when they add their friends to Facebook, they are doing free work for United States intelligence agencies in building this database for them.

Google+ only adds to the privacy problem since now Google will have even more verified information about its users than it did previously. The solution to the social network privacy problem is to use a social network like Diaspora where you can determine where to host your data or even choose to host it yourself. Another thing you can do to protect your privacy online is to use a search engine like DuckDuckGo (or ixquick) that does not track its users or filter its search results based on your previous clicks.