Google update aims to show you how it uses your data

If you're tired of hunting aimlessly for privacy information in your Google account settings, this announcement is for you.

Google said Thursday it's made account settings easier to navigate and understand.

"We always want to make sure that people feel in control of what data they're sharing data with Google," Tamar Yehoshua, the Google vice president who oversees account security, said in an interview with CNET. "It's important to us that they understand what they're signing up for."

It's important for users, too.

The changes have been in place for a week. Android users can now search all setting within Google Account hub to find specific topics, use a revamped interface to navigate privacy settings more easily and receive more noticeable notifications when Google thinks there might be something wrong with your account, the company said in a blog post Thursday.

The changes will roll out to iPhones and iPads as well as web browsers later this year, Google said.

While a new user interface might not seem like the world's most exciting announcement, the changes come as governments and advocacy groups focus attention on the way tech companies collect and use your data. Facebook continues to weather a scandal for sharing data with third-party app developers and device manufacturers. Google and Twitter, too, have faced scrutiny for how their platforms, tailored to users based on their personal information, may have helped an alleged Russian misinformation campaign target its users.

That all makes the way personal information gets used -- and the way companies tell you about it -- a hot-button issue.

Yehoshua said the changes to the Google Account hub come after extensive user testing. Google gave groups of testers mockups of the new interface and asked them things like, "Find the controls for your location information," she said.

Just as important as finding the information we're looking for is knowing what it means when we do. To give us the clues we need, Google now provides better explanations of what each privacy control does.

"It provides very clear language about what the settings are and what the impact is," Yehoshua said. 

Let's make this clear

Google doesn't have a perfect track record with communicating with users about data collection, said Jeremy Gillula, tech policy director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group that advocates for internet user privacy. The company hasn't always made it clear, for instance, that certain types of information could be used to target ads to users, he said. But, he added, they've been working on it.

As part of that effort, Google Account hub now explains how sharing data with Google might benefit users. One example: Reminders about upcoming flights, which requires letting Google access information about travel reservations from our email accounts.

Gillula agrees it's important to show examples of the real information the search giant collects to help us decide if it's something we want to keep sharing. In the Google Account hub, that information can be found in the My Activity section, which appears just under the settings that control what data you share with Google.

Clicking on My Activity will show your recent searches on Google's search engine, Maps and even inside your Gmail account. That information can be both revealing and workaday -- for example, my recent searches show I'm interested in a conference in Baltimore this fall, and I'm looking for a deal on really comfortable shoes.

And targeted ads, too

Of course, Google also uses your information to show you tailored ads. You know, like the weeks of ads for comfortable shoes that I'd be likely to see based on my recent searches. You can opt out of tailored ads in the Google Account hub.

Google provides a simple on-off button for users, letting them opt out of tailored ads. But that option is separate from the controls that let you decide whether to share information like your recent searches and location.

"It will say things like the feature gives you more personalized experiences and better recommendations," Gillula said. "It doesn't explicitly say, 'to target ads at you.'"

Still, Google did publish a blog post last week explaining how the information you share with it affects the ads you see.

"For example, if you watched highlights from a recent soccer match on YouTube or searched 'soccer fields near me' you might see an ad for a slick pair of soccer shorts," Google product manager Philippe de Lurand Pierre-Paul said in the post.

Finding the Google Account hub

One aspect of the Google Account hub that Yehoshua said she hopes to keep improving is helping users find it to begin with.

There's an access point to the hub from any Google app on your phone, she said, but it's easier to find in some apps than in others. Right now, it takes four taps to get from the home screen of an Android phone to the Google Account hub through the Gmail app, but other apps like Maps or Photos don't have the same clear path to the settings for the entire Google account.

"You will see more access points over time, especially in apps," Yehoshua said.

Twenty reasons why you should never be instantly available.

Every hard worker knows the sheer ecstasy of logging onto one’s work email and switching on the “out-of-office” alert system before a big trip. (Honestly, is there any better feeling?) But when you travel as much as I do—as a self-employed writer, I spend practically half my life at 30,000 feet and on foreign soil—you learn a dirty little secret: you should never, ever, ever, turn that alert off. Seriously. I don’t. My out-of-office alert is activated regardless of whether I’m in China or I’m sitting at my desk in my New York apartment. Yes, it’s activated right now, thank you very much.

Sounds crazy? It’s not! And, for the record, I’m serious. In fact, I’d wager that it’s the single greatest productivity hack anyone can do that will also restore sanity to your busy life. 

Now, I know that many of you won’t have the stomach for this, especially if you have a day job in an open floor-plan workspace, but I’d urge you to try it anyway—just let your teammates know what you’re doing. (But no, don’t tell your clients.) If you keep your email set to out-of-office at all times, you’ll be happier, you’ll be less stressed, and you’ll get more things done than you ever imagined. So read on, and shoot me an email later to thank me.

1. You’ll feel super polite - Full disclosure: I’m British. And yes, we’re pre-programmed to be polite, so I consider the auto-reply the digital equivalent of nodding hello when someone greets me. Don’t we all deserve such courtesy?;

2. You won’t stress about un-replied messages - Remember how your body sometimes goes into that whole mini-fight-or-flight when your phone buzzes in your pocket? Is that the boss? Is it my angry client? I hope it’s just a great newsletter! 

   We’ll, kiss those feelings goodbye, because guess what? You’ve already gotten back to them. Ever heard of “email apnea?” It’s a real thing. Having a robot-you instantly hitting your colleagues and friends back will alleviate all of your anxiety.

3. You know that they know you got their email - Because “Did you get my email?” emails are a total waste of Internet bandwidth.

4. You’re instantly more productive - One study showed that white-collar workers like me spend upwards of 25 percent of the day replying to email—and here’s the catch: that was back in 2004! Liberated from email pressure, I can focus on what matters: work. Translation: I’m at least 25 percent more productive than you are.

5. You can avoid obnoxious requests - We’ve all been asked to tackle projects we don’t want to, or posed questions we’re not quite sure how to answer. That auto-responder is the world’s greatest sidestepping or stalling mechanism that provides an embarrassment-proof solution. Ignore an email for long enough after confirming it was received, and that awkward request might well never be repeated.

6. It makes you feel like you’re on vacation even if you’re not - I update my auto-reply every week with any pertinent info, a change in time zones, for example, and that final click when it goes live? The feeling is like a mini vacation in itself.   

7. You’re way less distracted - I’m not easily distracted, but everyone can suffer from concentration hiccups. In fact, studies show it takes between 64 seconds and 67 seconds to return to their original train of thought after pitstopping in their inbox. Ringfencing it - so you don’t feel the need to constantly check your phone - could save you up to an hour a day.

8. People will like you - You may think that your colleagues and friends will be offended by your out-of-office. It’s quite the opposite: I’ve found that many actually appreciate the auto-reply, as it’s a sign of good communication. Plenty of first time recipients also email me back, enviously, with some form of: “I wish I’d thought of that!”

9. You get hassled less - We’re all a little lazy. And these days it’s so easy to delegate certain tasks to colleagues. Newsflash: Often that colleague is me. Well, having the always-active auto-response pushes back against this instinct: rather than wait for my reply, those people often resolve whatever they need independently.

10. You know what’s truly urgent - Instead of passive-aggressively marking a message with an exclamation point, these bounce-backs force colleagues and friends to prove how urgent their message is. Will they actually call me? Is the office really burning down?

    Yes, the out-of-office sifts out all essential tasks from kinda-maybes.

11. People email you… Less! - Over the long term, once people know you’re not an email slave who knee-jerk-responds to every message, you’ll find your inbox deluge slows to a trickle. Trust me: this is a fact.

12. It makes you feel super professional - I’m self-employed, and I don’t have an assistant. So I treat that OOO as the virtual digital version of an old school PA, taking a message after any enquiry and promising to pass it along. It makes me feel more professional, even when I’m sitting in my pajamas at 3pm.

13. It helps you with spam emails - Like everyone, I receive plenty of spam email—as a journalist, often in the form of press releases. My always-active auto-response can help here, too: don’t be afraid to add a final sentence along the lines of, “If this is a newsletter or automated spam service, please unsubscribe me.” Bots will scan for that word and act accordingly, as will human beings. It’s like a homemade version of Unroll.

14. It allows you to reassert control - Yes, that cluttered inbox is like a nagging relative, just carping for attention. According to one study, we think we check email just once an hour, but the truth is it’s more like every five minutes. An auto-response puts me back in pole position, so I can allocate certain times to reply to whatever messages seem important - or not reply at all.

15. You’ll stop replying to every email you receive - Unless you work in customer service, replying to emails is not part of your job description. Auto-responders provide a built-in cooling-off period for your inbox: inhale deeply in the breathing room it affords you, and you’ll be less anxious about simply ignoring a message or two.

16. You can use it to your advantage - If you’re thoughtful, it can be a good promotional tool: include a hotlink (like this) to whatever recent project you’ve completed on the bounceback, and you’ve earned yourself free, automated PR.

17. Because what’s the worst that can happen? - In an era bedeviled by trolling, we’ve become squeamish about straightforward, no-nonsense assertiveness. A simple note that says, “Bear with me as my inbox is overloaded, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can,” is refreshingly direct.

18. You learn to let your emails work for you - I’ve found that adding a sentence saying, “If this is a request for assistance or an article, I’m immensely grateful for your email; there’s no need to follow up, as I will definitely get back to you if I want to chat more.” That canned response will probably reduce the number of emails you even need to answer by 20%.

19. You’ll be unique - Judging by the reactions I get, not very many people do this.

20. You’ll get a great ego boost - That auto-response is tacitly telegraphing to your correspondents: “I’m just a bit more important than you are.”

So do it - and own it.

When it comes to creating websites, companies can often be too close to the project to think like a customer, and identify what motivates them to visit a site and buy from it. Understanding how customers navigate your website and how they interpret the information they find there is an important part of your Web design process and something that is often overlooked, or a poorly planned afterthought.

Website user testing can provide important, unbiased insight into how customers really interact with your Web site, enabling you to understand their way of thinking, identify issues that you haven't considered and discover the problems that can drive customers away from your site and off to your competitors

Netwise has previously used a useful Web site user testing service from UserTesting.com that provides a Flash video of a user talking through their experience as they browse your website, and includes a written summary explaining what they liked and disliked, and what would have caused them to leave, all for US$29. You can test any website, including reviewing two different sites at once. Take a look at their User Testing FAQ to find out more about the product

If you'd like assistance with user testing for your website, get in touch with Netwise to discuss a strategy to suit your requirements

Sick of horribly embarrassing things showing up when potential employers Google your name? Tired of everyone knowing you live in a garden level dungeon apartment? Perhaps you just don't like the fact the Internet makes you easy to find. Thankfully, it's not that hard to delete yourself entirely. Here's how to do it.

For mildly famous (or infamous) individuals, disappearing is essentially impossible, but for the average person it's surprisingly easy. It just depends on much info is already out there.

Step 1: Delete your social network accounts

Chances are the first results that pop up on a Google search of your name are your social network profiles. This likely includes things like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and anywhere else you're using your real name. So, the first step to disappearing from the Internet is to remove these profiles.

If you just want to remove search results, you can set your profiles to private, skip this step, and move on to step two. This isn't a perfect solution, but if you want to keep your social networks it will at least pull the results off the search engines. Here's how to delete your accounts on the big social networks:

Facebook: To delete your Facebook profile, head to this link while you're logged in, click the "Delete My Account" button, and you're done. The process might take up to 14 days before your profile is completely gone. Doing it this way deletes all of your data, and it cannot be reactivated.

Some messages might still show up, but anything you've been tagged in will have your name removed (although the pictures themselves will remain). If you want those pictures removed completely, report that you didn't give permission for that photo under the intellectual property tag on Facebook, or contact your friend directly and ask them to remove it.

Twitter: To delete your Twitter account, head to your account settings page, and click "Deactivate my account" at the bottom. Your account gets deleted completely, but it will take a few weeks before results stop showing up in searches.

LinkedIn: To delete your LinkedIn account, head to your settings page, click the "Account" icon, then the "close your account" link.

Google+: Google+ is a bit tricky because it's tied to your entire Google account. If you want to go ahead and close everything including email, calendars, and whatever else, sign into your primary Google Account homepage, and chose "Close account and delete all services and info associated with it." This will get rid of everything from Gmail to Google Checkout. If you only need to ditch the Google+ account, follow this link and select "Delete Google+ content." This will remove your profile from Google+, but retain any other Google services you have.

You'll want to follow the above steps for any other social networks you use, forum accounts you have, or other sites you registered under your real name (this might include Yelp, Amazon, Quora, etc).

If you have trouble remembering all your accounts, Account Killer has a huge list that includes direct links to deleting your profile from over 500 different sites. Your Google search for your name in the first step should also provide a guide to places you used your real name to create an account.

Step 2: Remove unwanted search results

Once you get rid of your social profiles, content is likely still floating around the web that you need to get rid of. They might be images, articles, or even employer websites. The first thing to do is figure out where you're showing up on-line in search results. Search Google and make a note (or bookmark) where you name shows up on web sites.

You essentially have one course of action to remove this content: contact the source directly. Email the web site hosting the content and politely ask them to remove it (or at least remove your name).

A quick email works well for places like former employers who still haven't removed you from the employees list, family members who post pictures of you on their personal blogs, or even on donation pages for causes you've supported. In due time it will drop from search results.

After that, you can appeal to the search engines directly to remove the edited pages right away. You can do so through Google, Google Images, or Bing by filling out a simple form and requesting the URL to be indexed again. This doesn't always work, but it's worth a shot. You'll have a better chance if someone is publishing libellous content about you, breaking a copyright of any kind, or if a page is displaying confidential information about you.

If you cannot get everything off of your Google search results, you might also consider burying personal data as far as possible. To do this while maintaining your vow to delete yourself from the Internet forever, create profiles on popular social sites like Twitter, Google+, or Facebook as well as landing pages like About.Me with just your name and no other details.

You can also set up your own website filled with lots of keywords about your name but no actual information (or just create a 410 error page and leave it at that). It's not as good as deleting content completely, but at least Internet sleuths will only be lead to a blank page with no information on you.

Step 3: Get rid of background check, criminal, and public record results

By now we've destroyed the bulk of your search results and social networks. But people can still run background checks and people searches on you very easily. It's time to destroy that personal data as best we can, and dig into various people databases. Here are a few worth checking:

Zabasearch: Zabasearch is mostly about finding addresses and phone numbers. Make a quick search of yourself and see what it knows.

Intelius: Intelius can perform background checks, hunt down criminal records, email addresses, social networks, and more. You have to pay to get your results, but you'll get a general idea of what's out there by simply searching your name.

Spokeo: Spokeo is essentially an address book and it can track you down surprisingly well to reveal your gender, age, phone number, address, relatives, marital status, and a whole lot more. Again, it costs a bit of money to get your full results, but you can get a general idea of what you need to snuff out.

Pipl: Pipl aggregates all of the above searches, but it's worth looking at to make sure no others have slipped through the cracks.

If you're anything like me (or my neighbour who I also tested this on), then you're probably a little surprised by the amount of information these databases have. Now it's time to get rid of as many of those as possible.

You have a couple different options for this. You can pay a service like DeleteMe $99 to go through and delete all these results. Or you can follow DeleteMe's own guide to do it yourself.

The DIY method requires you contact around 25 different sites individually to remove the listings that include your address, phone number, income, marital status, current job, and everything else. Some sites are as simple as opting out through a link (Reddit has a great collection of the easy ones), while others require that you send in proof of identification and a letter.

Going through this step will help get rid of everything that comes in search results, but it will not remove your data completely. As long as information like your address and phone number are registered somewhere, people will be able to find you. Going through the process of opting out of background checks, public records, and people search engines just makes that personal data harder to find.

Step 4: Remove any usernames attached to an email address with your name

Any good Internet sleuth will be able to link together your usernames on forums, web sites, and elsewhere with your email address. Subsequently, they'll eventually trace that back to your name.

The process to remove this data is dependent on the forums and sites you use. If you can, unlink your primary email address with your username whenever possible. If you're dealing with forums, ask the moderators to delete any posts that identify you personally. Essentially, cut any ties between your email address or name with your username. If you use the same username for every site, consider coming up with new names for every site.

Step 5: Stay off search engines without going offline by remaining anonymous

From here on out you'll have to remain vigilant in not releasing your information publicly. That means no social networks with your real name, and a yearly audit of the background check websites to ensure they don't have any new information on you.

Chances are you still want to use the Internet, right? In that case, you'll need to set up a few things to ensure your data stays locked down. That means creating a fake identity.

To do so, you can create an email address on a service like Gmail or Outlook with a pseudonym.Fake Name Generator is a great way to come up with a new identity complete with birthdate, and everything else.

You can also use a temporary email address for all your communications, and then use your new pseudonym and fake email address to sign up for any services you need. To keep your cell phone records private, you might also consider using Google Voice instead of going through a carrier since you can make up your Google Account name.

As for the rest of your browsing, we've shown you plenty of ways to keep your browsing anonymous before. This won't have an effect on any on-line searches for your name, but it will at least keep advertisers off your back.

When it boils down to it, the Internet is forever and truly resourceful people will always be able to find you. But if you take the steps outlined above, you'll at least thwart amateur Internet sleuths and regain a touch of privacy.