Managing your Google account’s footprint just got a whole lot easier

Your Google account is probably pretty old. Mine dates back nearly two decades, with piles of undeleted email concerning high school events and afterschool clubs. That’s a lot of information to manage, especially if you find yourself needing to lock down your account privacy. Google is, of course, aware that it probably stores more personal data than any other company imaginable, which is likely why its new support page exists, making it easier than ever to manage your account information and who has access to it.

As picked up by AP’s website monitoring tool, this new “Manage your personal information across Google services” page recently launched as part of Google’s main account support hub, giving you one-click access to a metric ton of account options you likely haven’t considered in ages. From this single page, you can edit your name, email address, work and education details, as well as change access over data like your birthday, phone number, mailing address, and more. These links have always been accessible within Google support, but now, they all exist on a single, easily bookmarkable page.

A one-stop shop for verifying your account security

Providing some much-needed organization

Not to give too much credit to Google, but it’s a really well-designed support page. Rather than simply linking to the various settings pages included, each link is a dedicated page, explaining what you’re about to adjust and listing further steps below the explanation. I hadn’t checked the majority of this data in well over a decade, and while my own privacy settings were exactly where I’d want them — locked down, of course — it’s good to have a single space where I can return to at any time to make adjustments.

At the end of the day, it’s a small-but-helpful change, especially if you compare it to the Google Account Help’s homepage. There, selecting something like “Manage your email addresses” simply links out to various support pages, while this new hub delivers a simpler, more streamlined experience that feels a little more personable. All of these action pages appear new to me as well — or, at least, have yet to be cached or archived in any meaningful location. It’s possible they existed previously outside of this larger hub.

With the weekend just a couple of days away, it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to bookmark this page and devote half an hour to digging through your various accounts come Saturday afternoon. That’s what I’ll be doing as we roll into February — well, that and my taxes, I suppose.