An old ad, a forgotten account, a directory you subscribed to 10 years ago… and here is your address and telephone number accessible to anyone. Fortunately, you can delete this data with a single click.
A few weeks before summer, there are those who are planning their vacation… and those who discover through a Google search that their phone number is still lying around on the Internet since 2017. The worst is that we are not talking about obscure sites, but about abandoned pages with personal information on them. An old CV published on a job site, a Leboncoin ad never deleted, an old forum on which his number appears “just to be contacted more easily”. At the time, it seemed practical. Ten years later, much less.
And since everything ends up on Google, this data sometimes comes back in two clicks. All it takes is for someone to type in your name to come across your number, your postal address or an email address that you don’t even use anymore. With scams exploding in recent years, questionable calls and text messages “your package did not fit in the mailbox“, many are seriously starting to saturate.
Google therefore ended up offering a tool dedicated to this subject. The principle is quite simple: allow Internet users to more easily locate search results that display their personal information and request their removal directly from Google. The tool in question is called “Results about you”. To find him, you have to open Google then click on his profile photo, at the top right of the screen. Then, head to “Manage your Google account”, then the “Data and privacy” tab. Going down a little, Google displays the “Results about you” section. You can also type this name directly into the Google search bar to find it more quickly.
Once in the tool, Google asks what personal information you want to monitor: phone number, email address, postal address or even certain variations of your name. After saving this data, the search engine launches an automatic analysis and displays the pages where this information appears in Google results.
If a link is problematic, simply open the result concerned then click on the three small dots displayed next to the link in Google search. A menu then opens with the option “Delete result”. Google then asks why you want to remove the page: presence of personal information, privacy risk, sensitive data publicly visible, etc. All that remains is to send the request.
Please note, however, that this method does not remove the data from the site itself, you must be clear on this. If your number still appears on the original page, you will need to contact the site owner to remove it completely. But at least the link will no longer automatically appear in the search engine results. And that already changes a lot of things.
