Google usually saves a huge amount of data in all user accounts, but it also does it openly: anything published on the internet is likely to appear in search. Do you want to remove all the information Google displays about you? The company itself has a method to request its removal.
Spiders or “web crawlers” are the robots automated search tools responsible for visiting every existing page on the Internet to follow all its links in order to catalog the information. One of the best known and most active is the Google spider, a set of robots of enormous complexity which, supported by categorization algorithms, are able to identify and save any data. For all time. And that can be a problem.
Give Google your right to be forgotten
The Alphabet company has faced severe sanctions from governments such as the European one for showing private data of people who do not want their information released publicly. Because his name appeared in a newspaper, because of an erroneous sentence the subject has to deal with research that has not been corrected, because, quite simply, someone does not want to appear on google. Whatever your reason, you have the right to request the deletion of your data.
Google provides a mechanism to request deletion of personal information. The procedure can be done via mobile or from any desktop browser: just follow the steps answer the questionnaires according to what you want to eliminate. Once the responses have been evaluated, Google should remove anything requested after a review and confirmation period; as long as you don’t think the data hasn’t “public and journalistic interest“.
What type of personal data does Google allow to collect? It includes the following elements:
- Personal information that leads to the identification of the individual.
- Non-consensual explicit or intimate personal images.
- False pornography posted without consent.
- Photographs of minors under the guardianship of the user.
- Pornography associated with a person’s name even if it is not related to pornography.
You can ask Google to remove your phone number if it appears in searches, your identification number, personal photographs that should not have come out of the private sphere and any other information that relates to you publicly.
You should bear in mind that, although you can ask Google to delete the personal data you want, this does not mean that they will disappear permanently from the Internet: the website that published said data, and that Google has indexed, can keep them
Private Information Deletion Request Process
As we said at the beginning, the application process is done through a browser, so you can do it directly from your mobile. Let’s see how.
- Go to this web address.
- Choose what you want: delete the personal data that Google already displays or prevent Google from indexing this information.
- Select the “Only in search results” option. Google can’t do anything with the websites that published your information: for this you must contact these pages.
- Choose whether you want to delete pages with outdated content or images.
- Sign in with your Google account and submit web addresses to consider. Google will review your request and contact you with its decision or to request more information.
In the event that you request the removal of personal data for a legal reason, you must file a complaint with Google to enforce your right to be forgotten. The process is similar to the previous one:
- Go to this web address.
- Click on “Create a request” and select the Google sites where your private information is located.
- Choose what you want Google to remove. “Personal Information” would be what you are looking for.
- Select whether the removal reason is for your “Right to be forgotten” or for “Defamation” (because someone else posted false information about you on the internet).
- Click on “Create a request” and fill in the report with the data requested by Google.
