How to Remove your Personal Info from Google

You might have heard the phrase “The Internet is forever” sometimes. This sentence refers to the fact that anything that gets posted online will always be there, even though it may look like it got deleted. I’m not going to sugarcoat it: every single step you take online gets recorded, and it only takes a little bit of digging in order to rediscover seemingly forgotten and removed data. That’s why you should always behave and not post or say questionable things on the web. Too many people in this world have a lot of time on their hands, and if one of those individuals becomes your “enemy”, the possibility that they’ll spend their time to dig up controversial info related to you is quite high.

With that said, I didn’t mean to scare you. There are ways in which you can try limiting the amount of information about you, or hide said info successfully (at least from regular, non-hacker people’s eyes). So, in this article, we’re focusing on how to remove your personal information from Google Search!

What to know about removing your information from Google Search

Now, you can remove content about you that can be found on Google Search, and in some cases Google may even get rid of links that lead to the information from Search. But keep in mind that Search also shows info gathered from websites across the web, meaning that even if Google removes content from Search, it’s not guaranteed that it will cease to exist on the web as well. Someone might in fact still find the content on the page that hosts it through social media, other search engines, or in other ways.

In order to take down the questionable or personal stuff you posted, you should contact the site’s webmaster and ask them to remove the content (you can do so via email, for instance). If the website owner complies with your request, the information will eventually be removed from Google Search as part of the search engine’s regular updating process.

What kind of information will Google always remove?

What if you don’t manage to have the website owner remove the incriminating/personal content about you? Well, Google will take matters into their own hands if said personal content creates significant risks of identity theft, financial fraud, or other serious harms. Here are the types of removals that are available:

– non-consensual explicit or intimate personal images

– involuntary fake pornography

– content about you on sites with exploitative removal practices

– select financial, medical and national ID information

– “doxxing” content (content exposing contact information with an intent to harm)

Attentively review the removal article related to your request. Then, if you believe your request meets the requirements on that article, follow the directions to make a removal request.

Other information that Google will remove