Google has rolled out a new feature called ‘About Me’, which allows users to manage their personal data across all of Google’s online services. The new feature will allow users to see, edit and remove their personal information available with the company’s services like G+, Gmail, Maps, Hangouts, Play, YouTube etc. Coming to the feature itself, the new ‘About Me’ page can be accessed by clicking on the source link below whilst being signed into your Google account. It will give you a look at all the important personal info you’ve ever shared with the search giant, including your address, contact number, education details, work history etc. Not to mention your name, gender and birthday, of course.
While the options available on the ‘About Me’ page can also be found on the ‘About’ tab of your G+ profile, this new tool is better designed and far more convenient to work with. By the looks of it, the ‘About Me’ profile page is the latest G+ feature to be ripped out of the social network and spun out as an independent feature, following in the footsteps of Google Photos. With the mandatory signing up with G+ now a thing of the past, Google of course needed an independent platform to allow users to control and indeed protect their privacy, and the current solution seems to be the option chosen by the Mountain View, California-based internet giant. With the introduction of this feature, users can find all their personal data grouped in one place, which makes editing or removing them altogether a whole lot easier rather than trying to find each piece of info tucked away at different corners of a long and labyrinthine menu in the already complicated privacy control settings of a Google Account.
As of now however, the ‘About Me’ tool is far from the polished, all-inclusive product that you’d want it to be. Certain edits like changing of names and birthdays cannot be done from within the main ‘About Me’ page, and Google will re-direct users to relevant pages to do complete the action. One can however, make their account information private from within the tool itself, by just clicking on the status that says ‘Public’ or ‘Your Circles’, etc. Which is of course, the point of the whole exercise in the first place. The ‘About Me’ page can also be accessed from within the ‘Privacy Checkup’ page of your Google Account, whereby clicking on the link that says “Edit what others see about you” will take you to the said page.