You’ve probably googled yourself out of curiosity and immediately wished you could control your online presence and whatever comes up in the engine’s search results. Well, here is some good news for you! At its I/O 2022 developer conference on May 11th, Google announced that it will be rolling out a new feature that will give individuals more control over how and which of their sensitive data is used by Google applications and visible to the world.
While the search engine had previously given minors the ability to remove photos of themselves from Google Search, it is now optimizing the option to include everyone. According to Google, people all around the globe can now:
Request the removal of sensitive, personally-identifiable information — including contact information, like a phone number, email address, or home address — from Search.
This new feature is expected to be available in the following months in the Google App and Internet users will be capable of making removal requests through the three dots, which can be found next to each Google Search result. However, if you are too eager to make changes to their information and control your online presence you can still make requests through Google’s support page.
To make things clear, Google’s team explained that they will be closely assessing requests and the content that is available on a given web page to make sure that by removing any information, they wouldn’t be affecting the remaining information especially when it comes to a news article for example.
In addition, you should note that even though Google’s new tool is already a great initiative that will give you the authority to control your online presence, removing contact information from Google Search doesn’t necessarily mean that it is removed from the web. If you wish to completely wipe out a certain piece of information related to you, then your best bet is to contact the hosting site directly.
To add to all of that, Google is going out of its way to make sure your privacy is protected. The tech giant is also in the process of developing new features that will allow you to set ads’ privacy settings; in other words, users will have the ability to block certain ads while also choosing which brands or topics to see more or less of and we are totally here for it!
All in all, the platform is doing a great job when it comes to creating a safer Internet, where you can feel like you can control your online presence and choose what is read about you. We can see these new tools being useful for anyone and specifically influencers, who might have published personal and sensitive information about themselves in the past that they wish to delete now that they’re attracting more attention to themselves.
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