This appears to be caused by internal confusion about what circles are. Some people think that "has in a circle" means "is friends with". But Circles are a clas

This appears to be caused by internal confusion about what circles are. Some people think that "has in a circle" means "is friends with". But Circles are a classification system, like tags - you put people in a circle to reflect some fact about them, and those tags could mean anything from "close friends" to "people I know from this context" to "people I hate". The author mentions having a "people I don't actually know" circle. The fact that people are using Circles this way means that it's not okay to use "is in any circle" blindly, for any purpose. But that's what Google did with GChat. Oops.