Not wanting to become victim of the next Beacon-gate controversy, the Google Reader team has responded to the blogosphere's "helpful comments" by adding a couple simple features to hide your shared items from prying eyes. For the moment, we'll gloss over the fact that the term "Shared Items" implies that you're sharing your items with, you know, other people, and talk about the usefulness of what they've added.
They point out the fact that you can still share any tag that you have set in your Google Reader (as well as make any tag public or private).
They also illuminate a new feature that allows you to move all your shared items to a new, presumably unshared tag. That way, you won't ruin any future Christmas celebrations.
As has been said several times in several other places, we don't think this is a huge privacy matter. If you don't want the world to know your proprietary data, don't share. If you want a select group of people to see only certain items, tag those and share those under a different list than the default "shared items" list.
We, at Mashable, aren't ashamed to reveal our linkblogs to the world. Pete and I are the only ones on staff with active Google Reader powered linkblogs (or at least the only ones awake right now), and we'll proudly broadcast them to the world, here. Subscribe if you dare.