Well, I joined, but like Martin Brinkmann at gHacks.net, I took a look at the privacy settings first thing.

I strongly advise you do so also to advise sharing your profile automatically with everyone on the net.

There are quite a few settings to go through, and since I wish to make this brief, please go to his excellent (as usual)

article and go through it using his “tutorial”.  If you’re rushed though, do what he suggests here:

“Google+ Privacy in a minute or less:

Here is what you need to do to configure your Google+ privacy settings in less than a minute.

Click on your name and select privacy from the context menu. On the Profile and privacy page click on Edit visibility on profile and change visibility settings for the items on the screen. Once you are done click on your name again and Privacy.

Switch to Google+ on the left sidebar and modify the tagging and notification preferences on that screen.

Et voila, you have successfully configured your Google+ privacy settings.”

It can be found here: http://www.ghacks.net/2011/07/03/google-privacy-notifications-what-you-should-check/

Thanks, Martin for your timely and thorough walk through. It helped a great deal!

Update 1: Google to delete all "Private Profiles" from Google+ by July 31, 2011

http://www.neowin.net/news/google-to-delete-all-private-profiles-from-google-by-july-31

"While the help section  for Google+ states that almost all of the profiles for the Google Profiles are already public, it adds, "We believe that using Google Profiles to help people find and connect with you online is how the product is best used. Private profiles don’t allow this, so we have decided to require all profiles to be public." While some users may not care for this viewpoint, keep in mind that Google only requires that your profile show your name and gender on your page. Other personal info that you can to post on your page can still be kept private. The Google+ service also has a feature that keeps your profile page from being picked up on search results from the Google web site.

Earlier today it was reported that Google plans to rename its Blogger and Picasa divisions as Google Blogs and Google Photos, respectively. This new move is suppose to help consolidate most of the various Google brands before the official launch of Google+."

Update 2: Known Privacy bugs with Google+

https://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/static.py?page=known_issues.cs