It’s rather expected that cyber attackers who’ve been lurking on Facebook will gradually allocate focus on Google+, the newly launched social network by Google. There’s always a way or two to make one’s profile safer and it’s a matter of personal discretion to protect it. That being said, social media networks are not entirely at fault when user accounts get hacked. As for Google+, here are some ways to ensure that you keep your privacy secure.

Google+ allows users to set up different circles of friends where they can create and share information with. This is to make sure that only an intended circle can see certain information that you wish to part. It’s also important to lock down your profile. Default settings of Google+ allow anyone on the web to see it so you might as well alter this setting to friends only. Moreover, profiles appear when looked up using search engines so you might also want to change this.

In addition, you can limit who can see your circles and send you e-mail, and you can block specific users as well. Also, Google+ will remember the recent groups you shared information with so you can immediately use the same group in your next post. Lastly, comments you make on other people’s post are visible to the public so be sure you know what you’re saying. (The dinosaurs flourished during the Precambrian period. Oh no, they didn’t.)

Even Mark Zuckerberg, and Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have activated the privacy settings on their Google+ profiles, hiding their followers on the social network. Zuckerberg, who had 134,328 followers, recently went down to zero followers, paving way to Rackspace Robert Scoble to get the number one spot.

Google+ is working hard not to echo the privacy missteps of Facebook, but it seems like it has went a little overboard. The social network recently implemented the “real name” policy and there has been a torrent of posts and debates among its users, raising the flag of the importance of pseudonymity. This is all in an effort to promote greater transparency, or so Google+ says. Users were given the chance to correct their profiles, to be checked by the new algorithm both human and computational. Banned profiles just disappeared without a trace.

In spite of all this, Google+ seems to be succeeding where Google Buzz failed. The statistics are great and they even ran out of disk space because of the influx of new users. Google even had to drop real-time search as well because of the Google+ surge.