How much do you really want the world to know about you? If you have a Google account, there’s a new way to control what people online can learn about you just from your Google profile, although Google has been oddly quiet about actually publicizing it.
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Per TechCrunch, the new Google About Me page aims to make online privacy settings more transparent. When you visit the page while logged into your Google account, you’ll see your profile photo and some basic information about your education and where you live and work, among other things. You can edit this information or delete it all together if you want. Here, for example, is part of my page:
At the bottom of the page, there’s a link to change your Google profile privacy settings so you can further limit what people can learn about you on your assorted Google pages.
“Google’s About me page doesn’t alleviate the fact that Google has a big treasure trove of personal information, but it does allow you to take some control over how that information is shared,” observes TechCrunch. “The company says the information you add or remove from your Google Account impacts a wide range of online services, including apps like Hangouts, Gmail and Inbox; on services like Play and YouTube; on Photos and Drive; on your Google+ profile, and elsewhere.”
Google explains that all the content on the About Me page is “information that people explicitly provided to Google.” It also notes that “people have control over what information is here and on the About Me page, they can control what others see about them across Google Services.”
Hopefully this page helps more Google users better manage what the rest of the world can see about them but it would obviously help if Google decided to make a formal announcement about it sometime in the future as well.
