Some users are complaining about the recently introduced feature in Google Reader, which automatically shares your "shared" items with everyone in your Gmail account. It's true: some people may not want to have all their shared items sent to people in their mailbox; they just want Google Reader to generate their shared items mini blog so they can keep it for archive purposes or send that to the exact people they want.
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]But saying that it's another way of Google stomping on your privacy, which is basically what is said on Slashdot, is silly. It's obvious that it's not a privacy issue; this is how Google intended this feature to be. In their official answer to these complaints, Google says "The "share" feature was always intended to imply some amount of publicity. That's why we used the term "share" and had shared items marked as public by default on the Settings > Tags page." Those who are worried about privacy should - for now - simply not use the share feature.