Looking for more privacy? Here’s how to remove your phone number, email, physical address, and lots of other personal data about yourself from Google’s search results.
Personally identifiable information (PII) isn’t sacred to search engines—or at least, it hasn’t been. Over the years, Google and its parent company, Alphabet, have accepted that many people simply don’t want to be found in a search. Some newer laws have helped nudge companies in that direction. Sometimes, users overwhelmingly demanded better privacy tools. So Google began to relent. It never hurts to appear more privacy-oriented than the competition—which isn’t hard to do when you’re up against Facebook. Recently, Google added to its privacy repertoire by letting you submit a request to delete your addresses (both physical and email) and phone numbers from potential search results. You can request this without even having to prove that the data floating out there is a problem (with some exceptions), which is a big step for the search engine. The PII mentioned above has been added to the already-existing ability to limit exposure on Google results of the following:
National ID numbers
Bank accounts
Credit card numbers
Personal signatures
Login info and credentials
Medical records
« Irrelevant pornography » (that is, explicit material somehow tied to your name)
Deepfake porn you may appear in against your will. If you’re afraid of getting doxxed, Google may even remove your professional contact info. That’s all great news, but how exactly do you get Google to take down the offending PII? Eventually, you’ll be able to do it within the Google app. Picture doing a search on your phone number, seeing it appear in results, and being able to click the three-dot menu next to the result to ask that it be deleted. Google says this will happen within the next few months. Before then, you’ve got to do a little bit more work. Manual Requests
The first stop is this Google Search Help page, which has a rundown of the options above but also shows the direct link to this form: Request to remove your personal information on Google. The options are either to remove information that appears in search results or to prevent information from showing up in searches altogether.
