You Can Remove Your Personal Information From Google

Google is a powerful, essential search engine that helps us find everything from new recipes to affordable flights. But unless you’re trying to sell something attached to your name, you probably don’t want your personal, identifying information available on Google for all to see. Now, you can remove it for good.

Google announced this new measure in a blog post last month. The company is giving users the tools to request the removal of information such as phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses, as well as information that could compromise security, such as passwords and other log-in information. To be clear, these tools won’t remove the content from websites, just from Google: people won’t be able to see your phone number or password from a Google search, but if they can access the site that information is hosted on, they’ll see it. You’ll need to contact the site directly for that type of removal.

However, this is a great first step. To get started, head to this Google site. Here, you can choose to remove information from a Google search, or prevent information from being found on a Google search. Follow the service’s on-screen instructions to proceed, as different answers lead to different actions. If you’re looking to scrub information from a Google search, for example, you can say whether or not you’ve contacted the website that hosts that information: then, you can choose what type of information you’re trying to erase.

It’s not a perfect system, to be sure, but it’s a helpful start for anyone who has information on the internet they’d rather not be out there.