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.