Google Plus seems to be hiding their options well enough (Or is that just me?). Whether it’s their lack of usability concerns or the way they prefer to control which settings you ever get to use is an open-ended question..

Let’s see if that’s just me or not: Have you ever tried tweaking the below settings? Did you know you could do that?

1. Control who can interact with you

By default:

• People in your extended circles (those that have common friends with you) can send you an email notifications*.
• Anyone can comment on your updates.

*Here’s an example to make it clearer: Let’s say someone added you to circles but you never circled back (because you don’t know that person). Now, even though, you didn’t reciprocate, that someone can go ahead, post an update on Google Plus and check “Also send email to Your circles” and, since you are in his/her circles, you’ll be notified.

You may feel good about that (connecting to people outside of your circles) or you may keep wondering why someone you don’t know keeps sending you email updates: That’s your personal choice.

2. Control who can invite you to a Hangout

While you surely appreciate ALL people who think about you when hanging out, it may get too distracting… especially when you are running into a risk to miss an invite from really close friends or important people because of all the clutter.

Using Settings page you can actually limit:

• Which of your circles can hangout with you (without invitation)
• If people outside of your circles can invite you to a hangout
• Whether you want to receive notifications (email and web-based) about those invitations.

3. Control who you are subscribed to

If you are reading updates in your Google Plus home page, you may have noticed a random “What’s hot and recommended” updates from people outside of your circles. Those come from this setting where, by default, you seem to be subscribed to “Occasional updates from people outside your circles”

By checking it off, you are likely stop seeing updates from people outside of your circles on your home page stream:

4. Manage what you want to be notified of

I have blogged about Google Plus notifications in much detail here. Most of notification options can be changed from within the Settings page (You can even set to send notifications to your phone number as text messages which I doubt you’d want to do:)).

You can disable the following notifications (They are all enabled by default)

• Get notified by email or phone when someone mentions you in a post
• Get notified by email or phone when someone shares a post with you directly (by apparently tagging you in it)
• Get notified by email or phone when someone shares a post and they’re in a circle you subscribe to
• Get notified by email or phone when someone comments on a post you created
• Get notified by email or phone when someone comments on a post after you comment on it
• Get notified by email or phone when someone shares or comments on your content across the web (for example, your YouTube videos or your blog)
• Get notified by email or phone when someone adds you to a circle
• Get notified by email or phone when someone suggests new people to add to your circles (I don’t even know how to do that…)
• Get notified by email or phone when someone joins Google+ and they’re in My (I mean your) Contacts
• Get notified by email or phone when someone tags you on a photo or comments on a photo you are tagged in
• Get notified by email or phone when someone invites you to a video call
• Get notified by email or phone when someone invites you to an event or updates an event you’re invited to; or reminds you of one
• Get notified by email or phone when someone takes action on an event you created
• Get notified by email or phone to learn about related Google products, services, events and special promotions, participate in surveys, receive tips from G+ team…
• Get notified by email or phone when someone invites you to manage Google+ pages
• Get notified by email or phone when someone invites you to a Google+ community
• Get notified by email or phone when someone shares something with a community you get notifications from

Are you still with me? Good…

If you are active on G+ and you haven’t changed those, I bet you have a lot of emails from Google Plus….

One thing I am not sure about if there’s a way to disable email updates for SOME of these while still being notified via the web interface… That would be really helpful!

5. Change which tabs people see on your Google Plus profile

The defaults are:

• Photos,
• Youtube / Videos
• Reviews

6. Add “Contact” box, disable visible stats & hide your profile from Google Search results

Those are almost perfect privacy settings:

1. By default there’s no “message” button on your Google Plus profile. You can add it here (as well as specify who you would like to hear from)
2. You can hide your “Views” stats
3. You can noindex your G+ profile from search results

and:

7. You can disable “Auto-hashtagging” feature

Have you noticed that Google automatically adds hashtags to your updates (they appear in the right-hand corner)

I am not sure why you would want to ban that behavior but it’s good that we have a choice:

Do you have any experience with all these different options and changing them? Please share in the comments!