Well, shoot. Google has taken a step that allows you to find and request removal of information about you that’s floating around the internet, and it only took them 28 years of needling, nagging, begging, and pleading from the scores of people who’ve been at the whims of Google’s omnipresent creep machine.
Good on you, Google. I don’t care what everybody says. You may be a tremendous creep, but you sort of do the right thing eventually, to some extent. I mean, while simultaneously crushing us beneath the weight of your existence. But hey, today’s a good news day. I won’t spoil it.
Much.
a freer, easier way to up your privacy
The newly redesigned tool is called Results About You. Google ain’t mincing words here. Its pointed, ominous name stabs right at the fact that the internet loves to Hoover up all your current and past addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, and such to preserve them online for all to see like some kind of non-consensual wax museum for anybody to gawk at.
Bleh. To use the tool, click here and pop your email address, home address, phone number, and full name. Then you’ll get a list of results. Click the three dots next to each entry to see if it’s eligible for removal. If it is and you want it gone, you can request it be removed.
The tool’s home page will track the progress of requests, sorting them into “in progress,” “approved,” “denied,” and “undone.” Everybody should take a swing through Google’s Results About You tool. It can’t hurt, only help.
If that’s not enough for you, though, check out DeleteMe. It goes a step further and tasks real humans (such exotic creatures online, these days) with combing the web for mentions of your personal information and manually requesting removal of them, typically from the large, creeptastic databases of past addresses, phone numbers, and the like.
Results About You can also update information rather than remove it, if that’s your kink. “In some cases, you might want an outdated search result updated, like if you’ve had content about yourself removed or edited from a webpage, but Search has yet to reflect the latest changes in results,” Google writes. “Now, simply click on the three dots, request a refresh, and our systems will re-crawl the page and obtain the latest information.”
Yeah, want to have your most current info placed on Google for anybody to find… That certainly sounds like something a lot of us want. We’ll get back to you on that, Google. Don’t wait up.
The post Google Just Made It Easier to Remove Info About Yourself Online appeared first on VICE.
