Senior Tech Tip: Results About You: How To Remove Yourself from Public Search Sites

Google's Results About You tool allows you to track your personal information and have it removed from many common public directory services.

By Russ Alman, Communications Director

​​One of the disturbing things about the internet is information about you is collected by a variety of information aggregators and shared on public information sites. This information is collected through a variety of legitimate sources, including public records documents and combined with information you share on social media to create a profile about you. Then these public search sites display the collected information for the entire world to see. Their goal is typically to upsell website visitors to view more complete information (like current phone numbers and complete addresses) and even offer background checks for a small fee. (Yes, anyone can do a background check on anyone on the internet!)

This should be a concern for everyone. Whether or not you spend time online, your personal information is being shared by these online directory services without your explicit permission. Yet current laws do not prevent these websites from doing so. These sites will remove your information if you request it, but it’s time consuming to find them and make the requests on your own.

Thankfully, Google now provides a free service called “Results About You” that tracks down sites that display this information and, on your behalf, requests that the sites remove the listing. What’s more, Google will periodically email you an alert that lists new sites that are sharing your personal information so that you can have those sites purged as well. 

To use this service, you need to first create a Google account (most people have one already). If you use Gmail in your web browser like I do, you can just open Gmail. Once you’re logged into your Google account in your web browser, go to myactivity.google.com/results-about-you
The “Results About You” page is actually buried inside of a long list of various privacy settings that you may want to explore further. But for the purposes of this article, we’ll just focus on this page.

You should now see a list of all of the websites in which your personal information shows up in Google search results. From here, you can select the services where you would like your information to be removed and submit that to Google. Then Google will communicate with these services on your behalf and let you know which ones removed the information.

The “Results About You” page will list all of the aggregator sites that contain your personal information. You can choose which sites you want to remove your information and then Google will make the request on your behalf.

Google will email you alerts when they find new sites that contain your personal information. You can also go back to the “Results About You” page at any time to review for new listings.

Google will email you occasionally with alerts when new sites contain your information. Then you can “rinse and repeat.” You can also go back to the “Results About You” page on your own to see if any new sites have appeared.

Please note that this won’t remove your information from legitimate public records sources, like county home ownership records and Washington Secretary of State business records or from social media sites where you created an account, but it will get your information removed from the aggregator sites.
To make this service even more effective, you’ll want to fill out as much of your personal information as you can in your Google account, such as alternate phone numbers, addresses and name spellings. However, you’ll need to weigh that against the fact that your are sharing more personal information with Google.

I signed up for this last year and it’s really helped me get better control over my “digital footprint.” I'm thankful that Google is taking online privacy seriously and helping people control the use of public information. I do wish they’d make access to this service more obvious — maybe promoted on their search results pages — so that more people knew about it. As it stands, it’s buried in a list of about 100 privacy settings.

Ironically, one of the criticisms of Google is that they store so much information about individuals and their online behavior. As I mentioned earlier, Google does provide people with Google accounts the ability to control how that information is used — or let you delete it entirely — but that will have to be a topic for another Tech Tip. But now that you have access to the “Results About You” section, you’ll can explore the other privacy and security settings in your Google account on your own.
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Since Russ wrote this article, Google has released additional improvements to the Results About You tool. You can read about them in Google's blog, The Keyword at this link: blog.google/feed/results-about-you-new-design/