Your Privacy Settings On Google Can Now Be ‘Very Very Private’

Date: August 04, 2023

When you search your name on Google, something might come up about you, let it be some information, a photo, or a video. If you want, now you can remove it all in one go.

Google has announced multiple updates regarding the privacy of search results that reveal information of users on its platform. The company has stated that this step is aimed at keeping private information even more secure and placing the freedom of retracting private information in the users hands itself.

Google also released a tool that helped its users take down any information online including their phone numbers, email IDs, addresses from any or all Google platforms and their related search results. The tool is called ‘Results About You’. The recent updates have made this tool much more powerful and easy to use for the general public.

What about the Dark Web?

Google did not hold back in its capability to ensure stringent privacy control, and even introduced an exclusive feature on Google One called ‘Scour The Dark Web’. This feature scans your information across the dark web portals and shows you all the instances where your data was breached by someone from the dark side of the web.

What Else?

The new ‘Results About You’ tool is not just to remove textual information, but it also identifies any image or video content that you want removed. This has helped multiple users take down unsolicitedly uploaded content on the internet and recover their privacy stature in a much faster way. 

While the feature aids you in removing explicit imagery as well, the platform is still working on expanding its policy regarding consensual explicit imagery as well. This is happening keeping in mind the adult industry creators whose content may get removed accidentally resulting in huge business loss for them. 

What It Won’t Do

The limit of this feature is quite simple. By removing all information from Google search results, your search will stop showing on Google the next time someone looks up a keyword related to your content. But, the content posted on the website does not get removed as Google does not have the authority to do so. So, while you will not be seen on Google search results, you will still exist online, unless you approach the respective website owner and intimate them to remove the content with a logical reason to back the action.