Last year, Google launched a new feature it called “Results About You” to help account owners have more control over the personal info that shows up in its Search results.
Things like a person’s name, address, or phone number, often shows up in search results, which of course is a privacy issue. Google’s Results About You doesn’t just help you manage that, but helps you remove them using this request form.
Today, Google announced it has updated and improved on this feature. The enhanced Results About You tool will now help keep track of your personal contact information in Search and alerts you when found, so you can get it removed.
You can sign up to received notifications from Google about new instances of your personal information appearing on Search. The way this works before was that users would check manually for cases where their info was seen in Search results. The new update changes all of that.
Google is also compiling all the reports it knows about you into a new dashboard, making it even easier to find your personal information — and remove it. With this new dashboard, you can quickly request the removal of your contact information from Google.
Note that the new dashboard and warning system only supports English in the United States for now but will come to more countries and languages soon.
As part of the announced updates, Google is also making it easier to remove (from Search) your private information, intimate or explicit images and videos that were created or shared without consent, as Google refers to in a blog post.
To this, Google mentioned two new Search features – SafeSearch blurring and Personal explicit imagery.
On SafeSearch blurring, Google says it is launching, publicly, a new SafeSearch tool that automatically blurs explicit and graphic imagery from Search. This will be useful for parents, schools, and private organisations to keep explicit imagery away from users. This will start to happen by default, but you can easily turn it off (unless, of course, your parents are the ones who turned it on).
While explaining Personal explicit imagery, the Search Giant said it has an existing policy that allows you to remove non-consensual explicit imagery from Search. The Search Giant is now updating it policy to enable people to remove from Search any of their personal, explicit images that they no longer wish to be visible in Search.
That is, if after you have deleted explicit images of yourself but they still show up in search results; it’s easy to request a removal.
