As part of Privacy Awareness Week, Google Australia has announced a new ‘Results About You’ Search tool to help you take control of your online presence.
Working in conjunction with the Australian Government’s commitment to tackling the issue of online doxxing, the new tools allows Aussies to check how they show up online and then request the removal of search results that show identifiable material such as phone number, email, home address etc. This is all done directly from the Google app.
The Google app will also allow users to opt-in to receiving an alert if new results with their contact information appears online. This will all allow Aussies to be able to hopefully prevent themselves from being not only doxxed but also defrauded from that online information.
It is important to note that Google will not censor sites where the information is broadly useful such as news articles and that Google removing it from Search results DOES NOT remove it from the web — to do so you would need to contact the hosting site directly.
While some of this is not new, with Aussies being able to request the removal of certain sensitive, personal, identifiable information, the monitoring of the status of removal requests and the alerts for new information is new.
The new ‘Results About You’ Search tool is rolling out in Google Search from today. We strongly encourage you to give it a whirl now.
