Google About Me Tool Makes Privacy Easy

In their ongoing efforts to make their services better, the mammoth tech company Google have come up with a great and handy new addition to their services.

In case you’re confused as to what services those are, considering that Google is currently being involved in many projects from areas as diverse as robotics, internet infrastructure to genetics, the services in question are the Internet related ones that it offers its users like the search engine that made Google into the hugely successful company it is today, Youtube, Gmail, Maps etc.

And the mentioned addition is the new Google About Me tool which just solved the problem of privacy regarding all the disparate data that Google had collected from users from the various above-mentioned services.

Before this new tool, users couldn’t easily see, in one place, all their collected personal information that was shared to other users across the various services.

But now, the Google About Me tool makes it a reality. You just have to go there and you can not only see everything in one place, but you can edit the date and, most importantly, remove it. With certain limitations.

For example, you cannot remove your photo or your entire name. You can only remove the last name if you desire. But your first name is mandatory. This is probably because Google uses your photo and name to identify you as opposed to other users.

Another no-no is deleting your entire birthday. You can hide the year if you want, but the day and month will remain inaccessible. This probably has to do with Google wanting to monitor the activity of its underage users.

Of course, if you’re not interested in deleting personal information that others see, you can go the opposite way and add information. And Google will give you prompts of what it thinks would be useful like: where you work and where you were educated, contact info etc.

The Google About Me app change came because Google no longer requires users to have a Google+ account in order to access its services (as it did), so since there are now those who do have an account (and could see their visible personal info there) and those who do not, yet personal information is collected from both, it was necessary to find an efficient, fair solution.

Which they did through this neat tool.

Another feature of the tool currently in development is to let you see how other users see you across Google’s services with a preview option in the About Me app, called “View as public”.

Overall a welcome change and another step towards efficiency and simplification.

Image source: 1.

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Nancy Young

When I was younger I used to spend almost all of my free time playing computer games. My mom and dad would go mental over this. “You’re never going to do anything with your life if you are going to play games all day” they used to say. What was even more unusual was the fact that I played more games than most of the guys in my friend group. Looking back, I have to admit that I probably played a bit too much, but I also learned a lot of great things. When I turned 20 I decided that it was high-time to make some money of my own, but the only jobs I could get were that of waitress or cashier. How exciting. After several excruciating months of serving tables I had a great idea: since I love gaming so much, why don’t I write about it? That’s when I started doing small writing projects on Elance. Eventually, I got an offer for a part-time job. During that time I learned all about content marketing strategies and how search engines work. I started writing about various topics such as technology, health and lifestyle and discovered that I was actually good at it. On November 24, 2014, I became part of the ArgyllFreePress team.