Ever Googled your name and found yourself uncomfortable with the breadth of personal information you’ve found in the results pages?
It’s a common feeling, especially with our lives becoming ever more digital. One of the consequences of increased connectivity can be losing autonomy over personal data. And it’s not just discomfort that can result from having these kinds of details online. Privacy is crucial to staying safe online. Having private data readily available puts people at risk of threats like online harassment such as doxxing. According to SafeHome, 21% of Americans (around 43 million people) have experienced doxxing of some kind.
Fortunately, Google’s new ‘results about you’ tool aims to give you more control of your online presence and protect yourself from potential bad actors. It allows anyone to easily request the removal of personal details like their phone number, home address, or email address from Google search results. This tool can be found both in Google’s search site and the Google app for Android and iPhone, and is only available for US users currently.
How it works
Whether you’re using the Google app or website, you can begin by searching your name. Once the results appear, you can tap the icon menu next to any results that feature personal information about you. Tap the “Remove result” button that appears, and you’ll be guided through the rest.
To check the status of your removal requests, open the menu by clicking on your profile picture. Then, click on the “Results about you” button to see what requests are in progress or approved.
Google notes that making a request is not necessarily a guarantee that the web page will be removed from search results. They will individually evaluate each request to see if it’s part of a page with other information considered broadly useful, such as a news story. They also point out that removing the page from their results pages doesn’t remove it from the web entirely, so if you’re concerned, it would be beneficial to contact the host directly to request they remove your information from their web page.
A welcome development
Google has had options for removing personal data before, but this new tool definitely simplifies things. Before, you had to find the URL, head to a separate support page, then fill out a form to submit. If you found a lot of URLs you wanted to remove, this could potentially take quite a while. There are also myriad Google policies based on the type of content you want to remove to contend with. For certain types of information, at least, this makes things easier.
A tool like this has certainly been a long time coming, but why is Google launching it now? Speaking with Gizmodo, Danny Sullivan, Google’s public liaison for Search, said that people now feel less comfortable with personal information being displayed in search results and would prefer not to have it so readily accessible. Sullivan’s approach has been to try to meet that demand without removing any information that could be of public interest.
Cora is a digital copywriter for SSLs.com. Having eight years of experience in online content creation, she is a versatile writer with an interest in a wide variety of topics, ranging from technology to marketing.