Google+ Events, Google’s alternative to services like Evite or Facebook’s Events, was announced
at this week’s Google I/O conference. And it immediately went viral…but
not in good way. You see, Google made a slight miscalculation in terms
of the Events’ privacy settings. (Insert joke about Facebook envy.) By
default, other people have been able to “invite” you to events, and
these automatically showed up on your Calendar – even if you had not yet confirmed that you would be attending.
The result? Some users were getting invited to dozens upon dozens of
unwanted events from people they barely knew. In the case of more
popular users, they were inundated with hundreds of requests from their
wide audience of online friends. The good news is there’s a fix for this
in the works, and another which you can implement right now.
It’s too bad that Google+ Events got started on the wrong foot like
this, because the service had potential to be useful. One of the nicer
features about Google+ Events, in fact, is its ability to integrate with
your Google Calendar. It’s not often that Google integrates its
services so seamlessly – case in point: those awful widgets on the left
side of Gmail for Calendar and Chat. Really? It’s 2012 and we’re still
using widgets? But I digress…
However, in the case of Events, Google went just a bit too far with
its integrations. Immediately, people began adding others to Google+
Events right and left. Yes, some of it was just to experiment with the
service, sometimes it was a joke, other times it was for “marketing
purposes.” But yikes, the notifications really started to add up. Google
just allowed people to spam each other’s calendars! News flash to
Google: our calendars are our own and we should be the ones in control
of it.
One of the more high-profile cases was that of popular G+’er Wil
Wheaton who made a public stink about the situation, and now reports
that Google has responded and will be taking action. According to his
post, Google+ SVP Vic Gundotra replied to Wheaton’s complaints, saying:
We are doing exactly what you requested. We should have contemplated and anticipated how people would abuse this and how painful this could be for celebrities with large followings.
We have pushed a number of fixes yesterday (some were bug fixes that showed up at scale). Expect more fixes today. Sorry for the trouble Will.
There has been some confusion on who can add you to an event. Wheaton
says, quote: “To be clear: People who I have in a circle can send me an
event. People who have me in a circle, but who are not circled by me,
can not.” Others say
they have been “relentlessly spammed by strangers.” Here’s an example
of some really awful event spam. (Notice the spammer had invited Sergey
Brin, Larry Page, and Linus Torvalds!)
[Update 1 PM ET: We checked with Google on this, given the
confusion. A company spokesperson confirmed that all the fixes have now
been rolled out. With regard to the Calendar integration, by default,
Google+ only put Events on your calendar from people in your Circles. If
you decline an event, Google+ also puts this on your Calendar so you
can later change your mind. Also, anyone is allowed to invite people to
an event, which then results in an email notification. But only if you
have that person in a Circle, does it appear on your calendar.]
In the meantime, you can take matters into your own hands. Head into
your Calendar settings, and turn “Show event’s you’ve declined” to “No,”
then switch the “Automatically add invitations to my calendar” setting
from “Yes” to “No, only show events to which I’ve responded.” That will
stop the influx until the changes Google is promising roll out to
everyone.
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