There’s a post this morning about how some people are complaining that Google Reader’s new feature where your shared items are shared with your contacts violates their privacy. Robert Scoble says that Google needs more granular privacy controls a la Facebook. I vote with his first response, that people need clarification on what public means.

I’ve written about this before, from the standpoint of being aware that future employers are increasingly eyeing a future employee’s online presence. Increasingly, I think, if you’re using social software, nothing is private. Search, even, is not private. Sure, there are ways to change settings so that your searches aren’t cached, your blogs aren’t pinging services, etc., but most people don’t change the defaults, so they’re just out there. And that’s okay. People just need to understand up front what it means to have so much of their online activity shared. And maybe being more open–online or elsewhere–is a good thing. Maybe it makes us more accountable for our actions. Sure, there are still some parts of our lives and our thoughts that are private, but mostly those parts aren’t being put online and if they are, I’d argue that either a) someone doesn’t understand how public the online space is; or b) they want people to know about those parts. Healthy skepticism is good, but paranoia leads us down a bad path.