Anyone on Gmail Can See Your Embarrassing Google+ Profile
With one random click, anyone you sent an email to from your Gmail account can see your old Google+ profile.
Open Gmail. Find a message from someone using @ gmail.com. Hover over his avatar, then click his name when it appears in blue. You are now on their Google+ profile. (You can also get there by clicking on their Google Hangouts profile picture.)
Hover over the avatar in your sent emails and you will see your profile. And if you’ve used Google+ years ago and then ditched it, your top posts might be awkward.
My public profile is n’t all that bad – a few old photos with overly diligent captions. But one of my friends only has one Google+ post, and it’s about sperm cleaning.
When most people tried Google+, we used it like Facebook, and some of us got surprisingly personal in public posting. Or we just posted the usual stuff that, years later, seems a little weirder, taken out of context. Some of these posts we would not include in emails to our neighbors, our boss, or someone who responded to our Craigslist ad to pick up the couch. But they sit there hovering over and clicking on the email.
This is not a big risk; most people will never go to your profile. But if you’re curious, go to Google+ and click Profile on the left. To edit or delete a message, hover over it to open a three-dot menu. (You can’t make a public post private; you can just edit the content or delete the whole thing.)
To remove your Google+ profile, go to the Google Remove Google Service page . (Check your avatar in the upper right corner to make sure you’re signed in to the correct account.) Click Google+. Before you confirm your deletion, Google will warn you about what is being removed and what is not. Then hit “Delete Google+” and walk away feeling a little lighter.