Default Google account on desktop ... You see your initials if you haven't set a profile picture for your Google account.

When starting a chat on Google Messages, Profile Discovery will default to using the contact's Google Account picture. This would have been fine as an option, but users weren't given the option to ...

This resulted in people seeing different profile images, but Google Messages is now letting you override that with “Set as chat picture.” By default, profile sharing — previously known as ...