What’s up with employees explaining the functions of their social networking site through posts on said site instead of a company blog? I don’t know what’s causing the trend, but I like it. Just like the Facebook employee who gave us details on changes coming to Events through his Facebook wall, this week is a Googler sharing tips on Google+ privacy.

Trey Harris, self defined as “Yet another Googler,” posted an album with a lengthy description that reminds people how to set privacy settings in their circles in Google+. As most of you are aware, the key difference between Google+ and Facebook is the use of Circles. These circles allow users to follow people without that user following them back.

An important thing to remember is that you can share personal information with people you have circled, but they may not have circled you back. This can be changed with a simple profile edit. While you’re at it, you can change how much you want to circled people to see.

This functionality can be enabled on a circle-by-circle basis. Harris uses the example of following a celebrity. You want to know wat they’re up to, but you don’t want them to know your personal information. You can easily customize those settings by clicking customize under your circles.

Google+ Circles And Privacy Explained” />

From there, you can delist the circles that you don’t want receiving updates:

Google+ Circles And Privacy Explained” />

You can also block what other people are sharing publicly without blocking them from seeing your personal information. Harris says this is especially useful when dealing with business colleagues. The instructions are pretty straight forward:

“Put such people together in a new circle (I call mine “Contacts”, because that’s how I think of them). Make sure the circle is checked in the “Your circles” setting we just saw. Then go to your stream and click that circle’s name in the lefthand sidebar.”

Google+ Circles And Privacy Explained” />

Now, at the top, you’ll see a slider. Drag it all the way to the left,

Google+ Circles And Privacy Explained” />

so it says “Show nothing from this stream in my main stream””

Google+ Circles And Privacy Explained” />

While I’m sure many people already knew about these features, it just goes to show that Google+ is pretty secure when it comes to privacy. While I still predominantly use Facebook, mostly because all of my friends still use it, I like Google+‘s privacy settings a whole lot more.