USING GOOGLE SEARCH, PEOPLE CAN DIRECTLY REMOVE THEIR PERSONAL INFORMATION

Thu 22 September 2022:

A new privacy feature that will let users directly ask for the removal of Search results that contain their personal information has begun to roll out by Google.

According to 9to5Google, Google’s “Results about you” tool, which was unveiled at its annual developer conference earlier this year, is now rolling out to some users.

With this new tool, if you find your personal information like home address, email address, phone number or any other information on Google Search, just click on the three-dot overflow menu that appears in the top-right corner of each result.

The existing ‘About this Result’ panel opens with a new “Remove result” option appearing at the bottom of your screen, the report mentioned.

Currently, to remove any personal identifiable information (PII), you need to go to a Google Support page and fill out a form containing the URL you wanted to be removed from the search results.

Now, you can also monitor the progress of a removal from aResults about you’ tool.

In addition to an “All requests” feed, you have filters like “In progress” and “Approved.”

On this page, you can also submit a new request using a “Why would you like to remove this result? ” step.

In response to removal requests, Google previously stated that “we will evaluate all content on the web page to ensure that we’re not limiting the availability of other information that is broadly useful, for instance in news articles”.

Removing contact information from Google Search doesn’t remove it from the web, “which is why you may wish to contact the hosting site directly, if you’re comfortable doing so”.

Google revised its guidelines for deleting personally identifiable information earlier this year.

NEWS AGENCIES

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

FOLLOW INDEPENDENT PRESS:

TWITTER (CLICK HERE)
https://twitter.com/IpIndependent