How to See (and Edit) What Google Shares About You Publicly

Google likes to collect data on everyone. For many that privacy discomfort is simply the cost of doing business. We want the free directions, the searches, and YouTube. Most of the privacy discomfort is pretty minor—Google doesn't make you share everything with everyone, only with them. But as people found out with Facebook, the default isn't always the most private. (Facebook's current default privacy mode was changed to "Friends-Only" in 2014. Before then, you had to manually opt out of the "Public" default. )

Since Google is so byzantine, it's hard to know all the places to adjust privacy settings, and since the default isn't always what you want, it's easy for certain features to be on even though you don't want them to. For example, do you want Google to share your birthday publicly?

To make sure it's not being too blabby regarding your information, this week Google created a page called "aboutme.google.com" where you can control what other people see when they find you on Google platforms, the Washington Post reports. This includes your photo, your gender, your birthday and more. You can turn stuff on, or turn stuff off as you like.

Google also links its privacy settings from that page, so you can confirm that everything is how you want it. For example, if you've been using Google's voice command, the default setting keeps all the recordings it made of you asking it stuff. You can turn that on and delete them, or allow Google to use that stuff to improve. Finally putting all this stuff all in one place and making it easy to modify is a nice step.

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