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Google's New About Me Tool Is the Anti-Google+

Posted by timothy on from the no-such-thing-as-undersharing dept.

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.

2 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. Main challenge to me by Maxo-Texas · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Main challenge to me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Dude, the Internet works just fine without Google.

      Actually, it kind of doesn't.

      A very large amount of all the web pages on the internet now load pieces of themselves from google domains and don't work well or at all without those pieces. googleapis.com anybody? It's all over the fucking internet. Want to sign up for a site? Oh, that requires google's "recaptcha" service. You can't sign up without letting google know.

      Want to email them and complain? Well, that non-google-looking contact address is actually served by gmail.

      More than most people know, the internet can no longer be used normally without google. Try blocking everything from every google owned IP block, and using the internet. Some sites might work, sure, but many of the most popular ones won't. Most people would consider it "broken". We are handing not just all our personal info google, but de-facto control over the web as well.