How to remove your personal info from Google

#security #google #internet

Being undoubtedly the most popular engine, Google seems to know everything. You look up any query - it provides you with an answer. But have you ever wondered how much it knows about you?

Asking yourself this question from time to time can prove to be very useful. Googling yourself provides a great inside into how other people, be it a potential employer, a date, and even a landlord, see you online. The better you know what links get pulled into the results, the better you’ll understand how to manage your online (and subsequently offline) reputation.

But it’s not just that. Googling yourself might reveal the pages with your personal information you didn’t know existed. These vary from people-finder profiles to business directories. And these are the results you should be concerned about.

Having personal info so easily accessible by anyone leads to numerous threats ranging from stalking and harassment to fraud and identity theft. Having even such mundane details as your phone number, legal name, address, and family relations revealed in Google puts you at numerous risks.

So, how do you remove your personal info from Google?

First things first, it’s important to understand that Google itself doesn’t generate any info. Instead, it crawls the websites and brings up the links that are likely to satisfy your query. So, the best way to remove URLs from search results is to remove them from the original source. To do that, contact the websites directly. However, if they don’t comply, you can still try to hide the unwanted links from Google’s SERP. Here are your options:

1. You find the URLs yourself

If you‘ve already located the web pages you want deleted from Google, you can operate right on the results page. Click the three dots to the right of the link and then click “Remove result.” You’ll have to select the reason behind your request and follow the prompts from there.

Another option is to submit the URLs via Google’s personal content removal form. This one also deals with websites with exploitative removal practices (the ones that refuse to delete your info or ask for a payment).

There several other forms you can use as well, each covering different cases from intimate personal photos to images of minors. The whole list can be found here.

And yet another form for queries about illegal content. This one covers copyright infringement, court orders, and trademark violations.

2. You rely on Google to find the pages exposing your info

If formerly you had to find all the links yourself and manually submit them to Google, now you can rely on the search giant itself to find the pages containing your personal data. A relatively new tool called “Results about you” lets you input your personal details and then crawls the web to find pages that expose them. Then you can choose which links you want to have removed and which can remain in the search results. You’ll receive notifications along the way and have a dashboard that helps keep track of everything that has been found. You will also receive alerts when new results containing your contact information emerge.

The great thing is that the whole process requires minimal effort on your side. The best thing is that this tool might find the links you wouldn’t find yourself.

The drawback is that “Results about you” doesn’t operate worldwide and is accessible primarily in the US and the UK.

Sources:

1.https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/3111061?hl=en
2.https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-of-search-engines/
3.https://onerep.com/blog/how-to-remove-your-personal-info-from-google