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Google's New About Me Tool Is the Anti-Google+
An anonymous reader writes: Google has launched a new tool called About me that lets you see, edit, and remove the personal information that the company's services show to other users. Google confirmed to VentureBeat that the feature started rolling out to users this week. Google's various products and services (Gmail, Hangouts, Google Maps, Inbox, Google Play, YouTube, Google+, and so on) sometimes ask you to share certain personal information. These details are then shown to other users who interact with you or search for you. Until now, all of this was stored in Google+, assuming you created an account. But Google+ is no longer a requirement for Google's services, and so the company needs a new solution, and ideally one that isn't public by default.
"The opposite of truth is falsehood. The opposite of an irrelevant Google service is another irrelevant Google service."
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Hmmm, leave that list.
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If you ever pissed off google by violating a rule or policy, they could (and did in some cases) disable the google+ account. Which had the effect of killing all your associated google devices.
So the risk was too great to actually use google+ and associate it with my devices. I hate facebook, but if they ban me, I'm only banned from facebook. Google needs to firewall physical devices from any chance of ban problems due to offenses in other google services or it's not worth the risk of using them.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
In step 3 (the advertising preferences thing), if you try to modify what it says your google profile is for advertising purposes, it asks you to create a google+ account for the privilege.
>> Google's various products and services (Gmail, Hangouts, Google Maps, Inbox, Google Play, YouTube, Google+, and so on) sometimes ask you to share certain personal information.
Google starts collecting everything it can about who you are and what you do in all its products and services unless you explicitly go down into the basement and yank seventeen different files from a bathroom with a sign that says "Beware of the Leopard."
FTFY
This whole "you need to spend an hour on our site hoping you've tweaked your privacy settings correctly, at least until we change everything again in three months" is BS. As the family tech guru, I've gone from teaching people how to use non-IE browsers to how to install the best possible Ad/Flash/tracking-blocking software I can find on all their personal computers and devices.
Yay! A new way to funnel data to the NSA! Thanks Google!
What good is a tool like that if you can't edit everything? I have a birthday listed, that is wrong - I can make it private but I can't fix it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
until they cancel it and replace it with some other dumb crap an MBA or Indian dreamed up.
Unless you happen to live in an area whose best home ISP is Google Fiber, the Internet as a network works without Google. But one still needs an alternative to the applications on the other side of the network.
Search: In my experience, Bing search was not nearly as effective. The last time I tried Bing It On, Google beat Bing on 3.5 out of the 5 queries, probably three Google wins, one Bing win, and one draw. So what search engine "works fine" in your opinion?
Video sharing: What site other than YouTube for public sharing of videos works "just fine", especially if they're in categories that Vimeo chooses not to accept? Vimeo's guidelines ban use of video game footage, such as in a review of a game, and are unclear about what makes a production company "independent" or where "showcas[ing] your creative work" ends and "upload[ing] videos with a commercial intent" begins. Or are people instead supposed to lease a virtual private server and learn how to install something like MediaGoblin? In that case, how do you go about getting other sites to federate with you for automated recommendations?
Sponsorship: Without AdSense, how should a small site go about attracting sponsors to pay its hosting bills?
Federated login: When a website offers a choice between "Log in with Facebook" and "Log in with Google", which is less evil and which is more likely to do the right thing?
Mobile operating system: Is Amazon's Fire OS substantially less evil than Android with Google Play?
But Google+ is no longer a requirement for Google's services
I've used Google's various services for a good many years, and have steadfastly refused to use Plus. So aside from the core Plus features themselves, exactly what "services" required signing up for Plus to use them?
Now, if you say that I can get back the usable classic version of Google Maps instead of this worthless abomination they replaced it with... That alone might get me to finally sign up for Plus!
If you care about privacy then why are you putting personal information on there to begin with?
Sure it's a "requirement" last I checked but they've never said anything about my 5 different accounts all full of obviously fake shit.
I find it so strange that when I was in school it was hammered into us from the moment we stepped into the computer lab to never use even the smallest details that could personally identify us. Our instructor even went around asking for our passwords regularly, if we gave it to her we were in for a 5 minute lecture on password security and had to change it.
By the time I left we had personal email addresses made for us with our first, middle and last names that we were required to use if we wanted email access in school (Those who did use them had endless problems with their emails not being sent or locked out of their accounts if the email contained anything remotely vulgar or offensive, regardless of context).
Any bets on how long before someone finds out/admits this just hides it from public view but still retains not only the original data but also the fact that you wanted to hide it, and when you did it.
Despite Google saying otherwise, it is still impossible to comment on YouTube without first creating a Google+ account.
Tell that to YT comment box.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
It's got my name wrong (an alias I used years ago setting up a junk email account), I graduated from MIT, work at Skynet, and my location is earth. In other words, 1 in 4 things they know about me is actually correct, although saying I'm on earth isn't much of a stretch.
if course, Google themselves, who I want seeing anything about me the *least*. Thanks but no thanks.
I have been able to edit all this stuff all along. They just changed the look.