Ye shall know them by their fruits (Matthew 7:16)
Google eyes
Recently it was my birthday (I’m not going to say what date that was, for reasons which will become clear later) and when I did a Google search, I was surprised to find a “Happy Birthday” greeting from Google, complete with an image of candles. I didn’t know how Google knew that, but I was busy at the time, I couldn’t be bothered looking into it and I just wrote it off as one of those “weird web” things.
The issue surfaced again more recently in a more sinister form when I tried to delete an online “profile photo” of myself stored in my Google account. There was nothing particularly sinister about the photo, just a standard head and shoulders shot, but it was out of date and not particularly flattering and I thought “let’s get rid of it then”. I couldn’t. I spent an hour trying to delete that photo when it was the Christmas holidays and I had better things to do. I consider myself a fairly proficient Internet user, but I tried everything I could think of to delete that photo without success. First I tried following all the obvious links to things like “my account”, “my profile”, “update details”, “images” and so on. I right clicked and left clicked on the picture and hit the “delete” button many, many times. I tried to replace it by uploading a neutral landscape photo. It was very easy to upload a new photo, but impossible to delete the one which was already there: I just found that both photos were then stored in my Google account. I tried Googling for “how to delete your Google profile photo” and found some instructions, but when I tried to follow them, they didn’t work.
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