Google Calendar is finally correcting this shared calendar oversight

A good calendar app will help you keep track of all that’s going on in your life, but they get really powerful when we start linking up our own schedules up with those of friends, family, and colleagues. Google Calendar already offers plenty of tools for creating and working with shared events, and today we’re hearing about a small but easy to appreciate improvement that’s looking to remove a little ambiguity from that process.

The issue Google’s looking to address concerns a small oversight in how Calendar grants permissions to perform actions, versus the rights Calendar provides to see information about other users. So far, anyone with the “Make changes to events” permission has been able to create new events on shared calendars, but when they did so, they wouldn’t know the identities of everyone else who could now see this event — all the other people that same calendar might have been shared with.

Even if you’re not formally adding all those people as participants, it’s not crazy to think that you might be interested in at least being aware of everyone who’s now privy to your event details. Google is apparently very sympathetic to such concerns, so from here on out, anyone with a “Make changes to events” permission will be able to see everyone else whom a given calendar is also shared with.

In addition to “Make changes to events,” Calendar also supports three other sharing permissions: “See only free/busy (hide details)” which shows blocks of time you’re unavailable, but doesn’t disclose what you’re doing or where, “See all event details” which fills in those blanks but doesn’t allow people to change details or create new events, and “Make changes and manage sharing” which adds the admin abilities of changing other users’ share settings and fully deleting a calendar.

Google says it may take up to two weeks to see this change hit your account, so keep an eye on your shared calendars for this improvement to go live.