Google__ The Missing Manual - Kevin Purdy [7]
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You’re not restricted to using Picnik just on your profile photo. You can access its powers anytime to improve any photo, without even signing up for an account, at www.picnik.com.
When your profile image looks good, click the “Set as profile photo” button, and you’ll land back on the profile-setup page. Now’s a good time to take note of two notices on this page.
One is a checkbox that’s automatically turned on. If you leave it on, you’re agreeing to let Google use information from your Google+ account to “personalize content and ads on non-Google websites.” That sounds like a pretty big thing to just casually allow the world’s most powerful online-advertising firm to have access to, right?
You can click the ? icon after this disclaimer for more info. In short, what Google wants to do is allow websites that aren’t part of the Google universe to install Google+ buttons, toolbars, and the like, and make them work with your Google+ profile. For example, when you read an article online or view a friends’ photo on a photo-sharing site, you may see a little Google-styled +1 button (you learn more about how the +1 tool works starting on Interacting with Posts). If you click that button, other Google+ members you’re connected to will see that you like the article or photo. In addition, you might see online ads for stuff related to what you’ve given a +1. For instance, if you give a +1 to an article about a kitten getting rescued from a tree, you might start seeing ads for kitten chow, scratching posts, and the like on sites that use Google’s ad-display services. If the thought of personalized advertising creeps you out, then turn off this checkbox—and don’t click any +1 buttons you find around the Web.
The other caveat informs you that Google+ is in beta. That just means that you’re a guinea pig and that some Google+ features may not work properly. The paragraph also makes it clear that you, not Google, are responsible if any data you didn’t want to share somehow leaks out. So use common sense and don’t put anything on Google+ that you wouldn’t be comfortable sharing with your mom or your boss. (You can read the full Google+ privacy policy at www.google.com/intl/en/+/policy.)
With all that understood, you’re ready to click the Join button and get going for real. Once you do that, Google+ displays a page that asks you to find people you know on Google+ through your Hotmail or Yahoo Mail accounts. If you use either of those web-based email services, you can click the “Find people” button next to its name, enter your email password, and then add people to your list of Google+ contacts right away. But, as explained on Adding People to Circles, you can look people up this way at any time, so for now, go ahead and click Skip.
NOTE
After you click Join, you may also see a message box offering to link Google+ with your Picasa Web Albums (this box only appears if you’ve already posted some photos on Picasa). Google is warning you that it’s going to make it possible for you to share photos you stored in Picasa Web Albums through Google+ (though it won’t share them until you say so), and start putting photos you upload to Google+ into your Picasa stash. However, albums you set up with strict privacy settings remain private. And, as a nice bonus, you get quite a bit more space on Picasa, because Google will stop counting photos under a certain resolution (2048 x 2048, to be exact) and videos under 15 minutes toward your total allotment of Google storage. For most amateur photographers, that means an unlimited amount of space. You can check your storage usage, by the way, by visiting www.google.com/accounts/ManageStorage.