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I know very little about social media. My son knows a pretty fair amount. He has had a GMail address for 6 + years. He opened a Google+ account approx. 3 years ago but didn’t start using it until one year ago.

I just noticed that his YouTube subscriptions and videos he has commented on are available for anyone to see on his Google+ account, after clicking Profile and About.

He tells me he didn’t know these two things were linked like this, he thought a history of his YouTube selections (subscriptions/commented on videos) were only viewable to him.

Does it seem plausible to you that he could have been unaware of the connection?

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Google recently connected YouTube comments to Google+, to the consternation of many. Among other things, it has connected people's YouTube comments with their "real" persona.

As for subscriptions, etc., being visible to others without being aware that they are such seems entirely plausible to me. For better or worse, social media providers haven't been terribly clear how much you're broadcasting to the world. (Facebook has been brought to task for this quite often, and now their privacy settings are a horrific morass.)

It's probably to be a little expected, though. Social media is about sharing. The more and wider you share, the better it is for the service provider (read: advertising). Of course, it's supposed to be of benefit to the sharer and the people they share with.

All that said, if one is going to participate in social media, one should assume from the outset that everything is shared to the world, unless one takes specific steps to limit or hide that information.

Some useful links:

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