Google has started rolling out a tool to help you remove your personal information from web search results.
The company announced the tool at the Google I/O conference in May, and it promised to make controlling your personal information online much easier. This personally identifiable information, or PII, may include your phone number, home address, or email address, among other things.
Now, as reported by 9to5Google, this tool has started rolling out to users in the US and Europe via the Google app on Android phones. Open the said app and click on your profile picture, you may see a new option “Results for you”. Clicking this will take you to a page that will direct you to issue a request to Google to remove any search results that contain the personally identifiable information listed above.
Also, if you come across some sensitive PII while browsing in the Google app, you can click the three-dotted button and select “Remove Score” to issue a request to remove the offending score.
The Results About You section will then enable you to go through the approval process for all of these removal requests. It is in fact a complete process rather than an automated removal system, with Google making it clear that it needs to “evaluate all content on a web page” to ensure that it “does not limit the wide availability of other useful information, for example in news articles” before deciding to consent. On removing the result.
If you don’t see this new tool on your Google app, you can start the result removal process by going to this page.