How to Use Google’s “About Me” Dashboard to Manage Your Privacy Settings
As many people already know all too well, the issue of privacy in the modern age has rocketed to the forefront of the collective consciousness as one of the most important problems facing our generation today. In response to these concerns, Google has just launched a new ‘About Me’ dashboard that users of the service can tinker with to strictly control what information Google gives away whenever anyone punches in a search for your name.
This can be especially useful if you’re interviewing for new jobs or just starting dating someone you’d only met a few days before, as what Google shows off about you can often mean the difference between landing a great position at the company of your dreams and working the mail room for a faceless multi-national conglomerate.
Here’s our tips on how to best control your privacy using Google’s new About Me page and Privacy Checkup service.
Find Your About Me
To start, it helps to know how to get to where you need to go. If you’re already logged into your Gmail account, Drive account, or Google + profile, simply click this link or go to the URL “https://aboutme.google.com” while you’re signed in on the account you’re attempting to configure.
While the first three sections you’ll see on this page will display information for details like what sites you belong to, your work history, and your basic information (age, name, birthday, etc), the real meat of managing what Google – and thereby the rest of the world – knows about you can be found in the “Privacy Checkup” section. Anything in the above three categories will only display in Google-centric apps like Drive or Google+, while what you manage using the Privacy Checkup service will handle any information that’s publicly available to anyone who searches for your name.
Running Privacy Checkup
The Privacy Checkup wizard can be found in the Privacy Settings box, shown below:
Once you start things off here, Google will begin walking you through a step-by-step process which covers nearly every piece of information the company has on you (and then some). For example, on the very first page Google will give you the option to change whether or not people who search for you see “endorsed” products by you in their AdSense ads. These are small photos that pop up underneath an advertising link that will tell others that you reviewed a specific product on Google+, or maybe left a helpful comment on Yelp.
This means information from dozens of different accounts could be tied back to your name where you otherwise might not want people knowing you’ve been, so we recommend that unless you have a specific need to give these details out, you keep this setting turned off.
Below this you’ll find a series of different prompts which will handle everything from whether or not your phone number displays/is callable from the Google Chat/People window to what strangers can see when they open up your YouTube profile. All of this data should be carefully managed to strike the best balance between transparency and maintaining a professional image online, something that will ultimately come down to the person on case-by-case basis.
Manage Your Own Data
Near the end of your privacy roundup you’ll hit the “Personalize Your Google Experience” tab, where you’ll find the various bits of archives and data that Google has been keeping on you which is hidden from the public eye. These are potential identifiers like your YouTube clip history, your location history, and your web searching history, however none of this would be available to anyone who hadn’t already found a way to access your account without your permission.
If you’re particularly paranoid about a hacker making fun of you for watching music videos for My Little Pony characters, you can go through each section and select exactly what your history shows, as well whether or not your usage statistics are displayed for the past week, month, year, or all time.
Bringing up the rear are your ad settings which, at least by comparison to the privacy settings above, are pretty innocuous overall. These control the types of ads that Google displays when you use its service, dependent on broadly gleaned details like whether or not you’re human and if you’re somewhere in the age range of 25-84.
You can turn these off if privacy from all sides is important to you, but keeping the ads turned on can also be a great way to ensure that you see more content that’s relevant to you the next time you need Google to point you somewhere specific.
In a post-NSA world, the concept of personal privacy may not mean as much as it used to, but that doesn’t mean we should lay down and stop doing what we can to control information the general populous knows about who we are or what we’re up to online. Walking the line between a healthy amount of transparency and maintaining a responsible amount of privacy is no simple feat, but thanks to Google’s Privacy Checkup it’s just a little bit easier to make certain that your personal history is well-protected.
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Mohammad Ghannam
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