Google is great at helping anyone who knows your name get in touch. But it just launched a tool to request the removal of personal contact information from search results, what with all the stalking and doxxing going on these days, and a guide explaining how to use it. [via Hacker News]
When you're searching on Google and find results about you that contain your phone number, home address, or email address, you'll be able to quickly request their removal from Google Search — right as you find them. With this new tool, you can request removal of your contact details from Search with a few clicks, and you'll also be able to easily monitor the status of these removal requests.
What it will remove is limited by a subjective evaluation of newsworthiness and other ethical and legal concerns which I'm sure Google didn't just have some engineers cook up from scratch.
It's important to note that when we receive removal requests, we will evaluate all content on the web page to ensure that we're not limiting the availability of other information that is broadly useful, for instance in news articles. And of course, removing contact information from Google Search doesn't remove it from the web, which is why you may wish to contact the hosting site directly, if you're comfortable doing so.
The big thing I hope Google will do with this, and surely it can, is disrupt or at least replace that whole ecology of shady privacy-fixer sites.
