Editor’s note: This article was first published in May 2022. It reports Google’s expanded removal policy and an upcoming one-click tool; the form, its options and the tool, later launched as ‘Results about you’, have changed since. ‘Last week’ refers to Google’s blog post of late April 2022.
How do you remove your personal data from Google search results? Over more than 10 years, Google has received more than 600,000 requests to remove personal data. Google turned down most of them unless users could show it was a case of identity theft or provide some kind of evidence of potential harm.
Google is finally making it easier to keep your personal information out of online search results, launching new tools as part of new policies. Users can now choose to remove personal data such as a phone number, an email address or a physical (postal) address.
You can remove your personal information from the results for any reason by clicking a button.
But Google issues a warning about removing personal data from its search engine
Google warns that approval of every request is not guaranteed. The company may not remove your personal data from search results if the information is newsworthy, for example if it appears in a relevant news article or on a government website.
In a blog post last week, the company also said that when it receives removal requests it will evaluate all the content on the web page, to make sure it isn’t limiting the availability of other information that is broadly useful, such as news articles.
At the moment, anyone can fill in an online form to submit a request to remove personal data. Soon, Google will make a new tool available that will let users request content removal in just a few clicks.
On the online form, you can click the option to remove personally identifiable information or doxxing content from Google Search. From there, you’ll have to answer a series of questions about the type of personal information appearing in the search results, the URLs of the websites showing the information, the search terms used to bring up these results on Google, and even screenshots of the websites.
This measure has taken almost a decade. In 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that search engines like Google had to allow European users to request the removal of their personal information under the “right to be forgotten”.
Even so, Google recommends contacting the websites that host your information directly and asking them to take the content down.
To request content removal right now, you can go to Google’s form here.
Featured image: FrDr, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
