Yes: Within the ICS file exporting an event I found a line containing “CLASS:PUBLIC”. So, changing that line into “CLASS:PRIVATE” was the solution.

Nevertheless using a text editor wasn’t convenient enough for a daily use, of cause. Fortunately i’ve got cygwin installed on that machine. So I wrote a little script to change these lines automatically.

By the way: I’m not allowed to install additional software on my company computer.
So, as far as i understand Google Sync is out of reach for me. Unfortunately …

In the begining it looked like a general MS Outlook fault to me – but now i’m quite sure it is not:
I found a post on Google saying that they expect the setting to be set to CLASS:STANDARD and they don’t feel right to overwrite the imported values. But, with respect, that is not correct. Refering to RFC there is no such value defined like CLASS:STANDARD! You may use that value – but it’s proprietary. You simply can’t blame microsoft for not supporting that.
The RFC 5545 defines CLASS as: “PUBLIC” / “PRIVATE” / “CONFIDENTIAL” / iana-token / x-name
And the value PUBLIC is the default value!!!

So, Outlook uses the default value for export – that can’t be a fault that big.
It looks like Google interprets the default setting PUBLIC like this: everyone using the default wants all their event to be exposed to the whole internet even though his general setting is set to don’t show event details to anyone?!
IMHO Google HAS to overwrite that value if the users Google Calendar general setting says so. But they don’t do that … and i think that’s a mistake and the root of the problem.
I admit reading RFCs has got to do a lot about interpretation.
But, c’mon Google – you can’t be serious about that interpretation.

I’m concerned that my situation is not that exotic:
Your Company does not let you install software on your computer. Your Company uses outlook. You personally use Google Calendar. Nevertheless you want to transfer company events to your Google Calendar. So you will likely use ICS export to do so. As a result you’ll exposing your business events the the world without even noticing – because nobody tells you and you trust the security settings you did in the Google Calendar.
I’m very concerned that there are much more people in the world having this issue without knowing.

King regards,
börnd

(please excuse my bad english – for i’m a native german)

thanks for your post about the security problems with google calendar.
It helped me a lot because the problem still exists today.

I ran into the same problem that Bryan had: some of my events are marked public – even though i didn’t want them to be.
At last I figured out what happend: A tool driven syncronization between outlook and google is not allowed in our company. Therefor i have exported all my events from my company MS outlook account as ics files and afterwards imported these ics files into the google calendar.

The problem was that almost ALL my exported outlook events where marked as “PUBLIC” by default.
So google calendar decided, while importing them, to view them to everybody afterwards – and therefor ignore my general security settings.

Right now I can’t find a general solution for this problem.
Everybody using “import” may still run into this security problem.
As an owner of your calendar it’s almost impossible to realize that your imported events are public unless you navigate into each of your imported events.

I don’t know if the behaviour is a misconfiguration of outlook or a general behaviour of outlook.
The result is a major security issue for me – the user.

So – unforunately after 3 year the problem still exists …

Regards,
börnd