Google's new ‘About me’ tool lets you control personal information shown by Gmail, YouTube, Maps, and more
It looks like Google works on a replacement for Google+ profiles. Sneha Bokil / Fone Arena : Google rolls out About Me tool to control the display of your info on all of its platforms Ben Lovejoy / 9to5Google : Here's how to see the personal information Google shares about you on the web Rita El Khoury / Android Police : AboutMe Is A Central Page To Manage The Information Others See About You Across Google Services
Context & Ripple Effects
This tool slots directly into the My Account hub Google launched five months earlier, extending that hub's promise from settings management to outward-facing identity: one page where users set how their name, photo, and details appear across Gmail, YouTube, and Maps, with VentureBeat noting it looks like a replacement for Google+ profiles.
The move reads today as the founding entry in a long arc of Google building self-serve personal-information controls, later extended by in-app public-profile editing on Maps and the "results about you" removal tool on Android that Google has since expanded and redesigned.
First-order effects
- Users get a single control point for the personal information displayed by Google services, ending the need to manage profile data service-by-service across Gmail, YouTube, and Maps.
- Google begins retiring the Google+ profile as its cross-service identity layer, decoupling account identity from the social network.
Second-order effects
- Each Google product team now inherits centrally-set profile data instead of maintaining its own display rules, pushing consistent identity presentation across the portfolio.
- The centralized-control model becomes the template Google reuses as regulatory and user pressure grows, surfacing later as Search-result removal flows and alerting when personal info appears in Search.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform-scale identity and privacy dashboards become table stakes: large consumer platforms are pushed toward giving users one-stop visibility and control over what personal data they publish, rather than burying it in per-product settings.
- Centralizing these controls also concentrates power over what "public" means on the platform in one company's hands, making dashboard design choices de facto privacy policy at scale.
The trend: Google has spent a decade consolidating scattered, per-service profile and privacy controls into unified hubs — from My Account through Results About You — turning user-managed personal information into a standing product category.