Google wants to help users remove their personal details from search results – this is so as the android Google app is looking set to help improve privacy on its platform.
Google Wants to Help Users Remove Their Personal Details from Search Results
Tech giant company Google already has started the rollout of a new feature that would eventually help users to strengthen their online privacy by helping them to remove personally identifiable information (PII) from its search engine result pages.
How to Remove Your Personal Details from Google Search Results
After launching the Google app on android devices, many users can now tap on their profile picture in the top right corner of the screens on their devices. And after doing that, there, they will find a new menu item known as ‘Results about you.’
Tapping or selecting that very menu item will bring them to a new page that will explain how they can further ask Google to remove personally identifiable information from search results. That data is inclusive of the likes email addresses, postal addresses, phone numbers, and many more.
Users on the other hand that find PII can now click or tap on the three-dotted menu icon that can be seen in the upper right-hand corner of each search result. And in that place, they will find a new ‘Remove result’ tool. And if they opt to remove it, they will need to include a reason such as ‘it shows my personal contact info’, ‘it contains illegal info’, or ‘it’s outdated.’
The New Tool Was First Announced By Google Back in May 2022
The new tool was first announced by Google back in May 2022 during the company’s I/O 2022 conference, where it mentioned that it would be launching ‘in the coming months’, and now it has started to roll out for some of its European users and in the United States also.
Google Explains How It Selects Which Requests To Grant or Deny
The company also explained how it chooses which request to grant and also which request to deny: “It’s important to note that when we receive 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. And of course, 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.”
