Google Can Now Alert You When Your Private Contact Info Appears Online

Google is making it a lot easier to find and remove your contact information from its search results. From a report: The company will now send out notifications when it finds your address, phone number, or email on the web, allowing you to review and request the removal of that information from Search. All this takes place from Google's "results about you" dashboard on mobile and web, which it first rolled out last September. With the update, you can find your information on Google without actually having to conduct the search yourself. Once you input your personal information, the dashboard will automatically pull up websites that contain any matches, letting you review each webpage it appears on and then submit a request to remove it.

dam my fake address will trip this up

[Anonymous Coward]

1060 west addison chicago il

First, you have to give Google your private info

[John Smith 2319]

First, you have to give Google your private contact info, so they can leak it.

Re:

[John Smith 2319]

er, I mean, sell it.

Re:First, you have to give Google your private inf

[Baron_Yam]

Yep. Just how stupid do you have to be to hand over your private info to a company whose business model is selling your private info?

Oh. They're going after Facebook users.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Why would Google sell the very thing that makes their services valuable to advertisers?

Anyway, I live in a GDPR country so this isn't an issue for me. Google can't sell my data without explicit permission, and I've never given it to them. In fact they never asked for it.

i just googled my full name

[FudRucker]

and nothing about me online, no images or photos, nothing anywhere, as far as the interent is concerned i dont exist, and i like it that way :)

Re:

[Tablizer]

I got the upgraded account, and it says you are into drunk midget poop porn.

Re:

[adonoman]

So I have a unique name - not weird, just unique first/last combo. Absolutely everything that shows up in a search for my name is me. I often wish that I had something closer to John Smith, where there are so many matches that it turns into noise. On the other hand, I don't worry about my name being linked to a porn star, sex offender, or moron. But I'd assume for almost most, that keeping their personal information offline means that their google presence gets subsumed by someone else. I'm not sure whi

Re:

[Tony Isaac]

I think there's something wrong with your post, I couldn't see anything. Do you in fact exist???

nope

[dhizzle]

Joshua : Greetings, Professor Falken. Stephen Falken : Hello, Joshua. Joshua : A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

"on mobile and web"??

[dwater]

Ftw is not mobile about the Web?

Uh.

[Motleypuss]

If Teh Goog can alert you, it means they have your contact info already. Thankfully, I haven't given out real details to any website at any point.

Well duh

[Errol backfiring]

If it comes online, Google knows about it first as they snoop on about all internet traffic.

Read between the lines.

[NotAMarshallow]

This is horrible. You want to give all your private information to oen of the most evil and deceitful companies in the world? Just to insure that evil and deceitful companies don't spread your information, other than Google and it's tens of thousands of partners, and the partner's partners, you'll give it away?