'Me on the Web' Spotlights Your Publicly Available Data

Today's Internet users spend hours of their day browsing through social networks like Facebook - posting images, text, personal information and opinions. Unfortunately, many users don't realize the consequences of theses posts and the extent to which that information is available to the public. Keep this as the general rule - Everything you post to Facebook, Twitter, your Google Profile and other Web sites should be considered public content! You always have the illusion of privacy if you spend the proper amount of time adjusting privacy settings. However, those settings are controlled by each individual site and can change without warning instantly.

If this is all old news to you - good. This update is not to lecture you on your online identity. This update is to outline the new Google tool that takes all of this publicly available data and lays it out for you to see and potentially manage - Me on the Web

Google's New Me on the Web tool can be found in the Google Dashboard. You can also link your social networking accounts with your Google profile so Google can help you monitor your data on those accounts as well. This addition comes as no surprise. Google loves to collect personal data and they're now bribing you with this cool tool so that you can in exchange give them access to all your online information quickly and easily...oh Google you're so smart.

This tool comes with recommendations and general information on how to manage your online identity and privacy as well as a guide on how to get certain content removed from Web sites, including how to ask a webmaster to remove data. To be clear, the capabilities of Me on the Web are very limited at this point. It's just a central interface to see and manage your online information and not a tool that takes care of unwanted information with the push of a button.

For example, if you come across a negative review or negative content about yourself, Google cannot just remove that data unless it's on a Google site. Even then, chances are they won't take action unless you have a really good reason, like the release of confidential information or if a rev...