Digital footprint is set to look much cleaner with Google now allowing people to remove their personal contact information from its search engine
Individuals can now request to have details including their phone number, email, login credentials or home address removed if it poses risks such as “harmful direct contact”.
Previously, Google only allowed scraping of personal information if people could prove they were at an immediate risk in situations of doxxing or identity theft.
Minors were also allowed to remove some forms of sensitive information such as photos from Google’s image search results.
The new update allows personal information to be removed if its poses a threat of an identity theft, financial fraud, harmful direct contact or other specific harms.
Upon receiving the request, Google may either only remove links for all searches or only remove the links for searches that include your name.
While this information will still exist online, it just won’t appear in Google Search.
In a statement announcing the change, the company suggests contacting the host websites directly to remove the content from the internet completely.
This suggestion poses an issue for people whose information is present on websites hosting stolen data as these websites might not respond to requests of removal.
The update can also cause problems if the information is published on websites designed not to appear in Google search results, but can be found by criminals.
Rijul Baath contributed to this report
