Google rolls out tool to let people remove personal info directly in Search

New Delhi: Google has started to roll out a new privacy feature that will allow people to directly make a request to remove Search results that contain their personal information.

Google’s “Results about you” tool, announced during its annual developer conference earlier this year, is now rolling out to some users, reports 9to5Google.

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 a ‘Results about you’ tool.

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

This page also lets you make a new request with a walkthrough that involves a “Why would you like to remove this result?” step.

Google earlier said that when it receives removal requests, “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”.

Earlier this year, Google updated its policies around removing personally identifying information.