As a heavy user of Google services, there are a lot of settings and controls that are available to me to keep certain things private from the general public. I for example have no problem with everyone knowing I live in the Denver, Colorado area but I don’t really want everyone to know my physical address. I love you guys and all but….
Before now, you could go to the Google Accounts page and wade through all of the different security and privacy settings for your account and how things appear on Google+, YouTube and other Google sites. Now the company has made it much easier to go and find those settings and adjust them. This week they launched the Google About Me site, a single site that allows you to edit your personal information as well as privacy settings for virtually every setting on your Google account. Google About Me is aimed to help you see all of your settings and information and give you the ability to quickly edit them instead of having to jump through hoops on the account page.
The new Google About Me page can be found at http://aboutme.google.com and by Google’s definition, allows you to
Google About Me
make changes to your account that appear on Google services like Google Drive, Google Photos, Google+ and other services they offer. You can adjust simple things like your Google+ wallpaper and avatar to more advanced things like which circles on Google+ are allowed to see your address, phone numbers and the like. It is a web page so when you tap on a link you are often dropped to another page within the Google ecosystem but that point is you start at this one point to get to all of them.
There are some things that you can’t do on the Google About Me page like enable 2-factor authentication (which I highly recommend users do for security reasons) for example. You will need to go to the full Accounts page to do that function. The About Me page isn’t designed to replace the Accounts page per se, it is more about giving you quick access to the most common settings and information on your Google account so you don’t have to hunt-and-peck your way through the vast Accounts page.
As you would expect, the Google About Me site is free and you will need to have your Google account information to log in. The site is optimized for mobile (as you can see from my screen capture) so it is easy enough to access it from your Android phone or tablet as well as your PC, Mac or Chromebook.
Give it a try!
