CHAPTER FIFTEEN
How Do I Manage My Privacy and Personal Information?
In this chapter:
+ Discovering Just How Much Google Knows About You
+ Looking at the Privacy Center
+ Choosing What Information You Want to Make Public
+ Looking at the Google Dashboard
+ Accessing a Deceased Person’s Gmail Account
+ Deleting Your Google Account
When you share so much of your personal information with services like Google+, Facebook, and Twitter, one rather big question arises: How private is it?
Obviously, the information you’re posting publicly isn’t private in any sense. But what about your email, cell phone number, home address, and work information? And that’s before you consider the information on your private life.
Once you start to think about it, quite a few questions spring to mind: Just how much information are you sharing with companies? What are they doing with it? Who are they, in turn, sharing it with? How secure is your personal information from unintentional sharing or hacking? Exactly what have you permitted these companies to do with it? And why do they want it?
These are all valid questions. Even more so when you stop to think about just how closely you read the Terms of Service when you signed up for Google. You did read it, right? Chances are you didn’t. Very few people truly read these things before clicking Accept.