Act Quickly If You Don’t Want Your Google+ Posts to Be Archived Publicly
Google+ will get the ax on April 2 , but some of your old posts may remain whether you want to or not. In an effort to preserve Internet content, the Internet Archives and ArchiveTeam are making digital backups of websites and other Internet content that would otherwise be lost over time, and their next project is Google+ preservation.
A recent post on Reddit details the plans of both groups to preserve publicly posted material on Google+, as well as details on how volunteers can help.
For some, this may be good news – of course, everyone agrees that the shutdown of Google + was late, but a small, dedicated user base persisted until the very end. For them, archiving ensures that the legacy of their favorite social network lives on.
For others, the news that Google+ content will be lagging may not be as welcome, especially if you’ve assumed that old Google+ posts you don’t want to remember will subtly disappear when the service shuts down next month.
While the team working on preserving Google + content cannot preserve everything – private or previously deleted posts are unavailable, posts with more than 500 comments will only be saved in truncated form, and public images will be saved at a lower resolution – the process of archiving public Google+ posts has already begun, so you need to act quickly. Here’s how to prevent any public Google+ posts from being archived, and how to get rid of them if they are.
How to prevent Google+ messages from being archived
The best way to completely remove public Google+ content is to delete your account.
- Sign in to the Google Account associated with the Google+ profile you want to remove.
- Open Google+ (you can also do this using the Apps Widget or by clicking your Google profile picture and then clicking Google+ Profile on any Google web app or page, such as Google Drive, YouTube, etc.)
- On your Google+ page, click on ” Settings” in the menu on the left.
- Scroll down to the very bottom and click Remove Google+ Profile.
- You will be prompted for your Google account password.
- Follow the instructions on the screen to complete deleting the profile.
Deleting your Google+ profile will not delete your Google account, YouTube account / channels, or affect any other Google services. Only your Google+ account will be deleted.
However, if you do not want to completely delete your Google+ account, you can instead try to delete any public posts / information before the Internet Archives and ArchiveTeam reaches it.
To delete a message, you need to log in to your Google+ account, and then the message that you want to remove, click the icon “even” with three points in the stack, and then click “Remove.” You can make changes to your profile information by clicking Edit Profile on your profile page.
Fair warning: any of the above steps are not guaranteed to prevent archiving your public messages, as it is possible that the archive group algorithms may have reached them before you and your profile will be archived unless you delete it. fully. If so, you can still remove them:
- Search your Google+ profile URL using the Wayback Machine on the Internet Archive to see if any of your old posts are available. You can also do the same for the URL of a specific post.
- If something you want to delete has ended up in the Internet Archive database, you can use the page delete request form to request that the content be deleted .