I’ve never worked at Google, so while I can’t say for certain, I doubt the calendar has a “notify me about the juicy bits” checkbox. It’s certainly useful for me to know when my manager will be in the office or in some meeting, and if my manager marks the meeting “private,” I can know that he won’t be available at a particular time even if I don’t know what he’ll be busy doing.

If he finds it creepy that I know when he’ll be at the dentist, or be in a 1:1 with his boss, he needs to make sure the appointment is marked as private; I can’t do anything about it.

So, yes, I believe in this case, it makes sense to blame the people being tracked for publicity posting information that they didn’t want others to know.

Also, it might be legal for me to follow a person around in public and film them, but doing that is still incredibly creepy and indicative of mal intent.

We have them configured to be public by default because it makes it much easier to book meetings, particularly when you need to find a slot that works for several people.

With that being said it does assume that you have the common-sense to make appointments that should be private, private. I tend to do this for any personal matters, along with any meetings that involve discussing sensitive work-related matters.

(I also use private appointments to ensure I get a lunch break if a day is looking particularly full of meetings. If I don't eat something at lunchtime I tend to be bad-tempered in the afternoon, which doesn't really help anyone.)

Worth pointing out that we've clearly communicated that calendars are public by default, which hopefully helps people to know they need to make appointments explicitly private if that's what they want.