Google is launching a tool that makes it easy to remove search results that contain your address, phone number, and other personally identifiable information. 9to5Google has reported. It’s first revealed the “results about you” feature at I/O 2022 in May, describing it as a way to “help you easily control whether your personally identifiable information can be found in search results.”
If you see a result with your phone number, address, or email, you can click the three-dot menu in the top right. That opens the usual “About This Finding” panel, but now contains a new “Delete Finding” option at the bottom of the screen. A dialog indicates that if the result contains one of those three things, “we can review your request more quickly.”
You can then monitor the request in a new menu item in the Google app called “Results About You,” available by tapping your user profile in the top right. You can then monitor the progress of your requests through the “All Requests”, “In Progress” and “Approved” filters.
The same page also allows you to make a new request with a “Why do you want to delete this result?” step. Options there include “Show my personal contact information”, “Show my contact with the intent to harm me”, “Show other personal information”, “Contains illegal information” and “Is out of date”. However, Google has previously said that not all requests can be granted:
It is important to note that when we receive removal requests, we will evaluate all content on the web page to ensure that we do not limit the availability of other information that is widely useful, for example, in news articles. And, of course, removing contact information from Google Search doesn’t remove it from the web, so you may want to contact the hosting site directly, if you’re comfortable doing so.
The new feature has only been rolled out to a limited number of users in the US and Europe, 9to5Google notes (I haven’t seen it in France yet and I’m in the beta version of the Google app). In the meantime, you can remove other personally identifiable information or doxing content from Google Search through a removal request; there are more information on that available here.
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