Privacy groups didn’t like the fact that a new feature in Google Gmail will allow receiving messages from people you haven’t shared your email address with. Recently the company has widened the list of contacts available to Gmail users to include the email addresses of existing contacts and the names of people on the Google+ social network.



A good thing is that you can send an email directly to friends or complete strangers using Google+, but the bad one is that a person who you may not want to know your email address will be able to have it by finding you in Google+.

We can see how Google has been increasingly trying to integrate its social network with 540 million active users with its other services. Now when you sign up for Gmail, you automatically get a Google+ account as well. The company claimed that these changes will make it easier for people to communicate with their friends. Google believes it will be helpful for those who forgot to actually exchange email addresses to connect. In addition, the developers pointed out that users who don’t want to receive email messages from other people on the social network can switch the settings manually. In this case they will receive messages only from people they have added to their networks of friends or from nobody at all.

However, some privacy groups continue to complaint that Google should have made the new feature “opt-in”, which means that people should explicitly agree to receive messages from other Google+ members instead of having to manually change the setting.