REMOVE YOURSELF FROM GOOGLE SEARCH
Stop your details appearing in Google search results
Searching for your name on Google may find information that you’d prefer wasn’t out there, such as details of a regrettable incident in your past, a libellous comment about you or personal data such as your address or phone number. To erase this content from Google, you should first try contacting the webmaster of the site it appears on and ask for it to be taken down. After all, Google is just linking to existing material rather than creating or publishing it, so it’s usually quicker to go straight to the source.
Most website owners will be happy to oblige if you politely explain why you want the information to be deleted. They can either take down the whole page, edit the article to remove all mention of you or add a noindex meta tag to the page’s HTML code to stop it being indexed by Google (see www.snipca.com/39620 for details). Use the ‘Contact us’ email address or form provided on the site, or look up the domain name on Who.is ( https://who.is) to get the contact details of the person who registered the URL.
Once the webmaster has removed the offending content (assuming they comply with your request), it will eventually disappear from Google results as part of the search engine’s “regular updating process” - this may take a few weeks.
If the relevant details don’t disappear, or if you want to speed up the process, go to Google’s ‘Remove outdated content’ tool ( www.snipca.com/39593) and click ‘Request removal’, then ‘New request’ (see screenshots above right). Enter the URL of the page you want removed and click Submit.
You can also use the tool to ask Google to remove pictures of you from its Image
Search results, provided they’ve already been deleted from or modified on the source web page. Google will tell you the status of your removal request at www. snipca.com/39594.
If the site owner refuses or ignores your request, you can ask Google directly to stop including the content in its search results. Google will remove personal information such as financial, medical and identity data, ‘doxxing’ content that exposes your contact details “with an intent to harm” (see screenshot below left) and content about you on ‘exploitative’ sites that charge you to delete it, as well as intimate personal images.
Each of these types of information has its own removal request process: visit the ‘Remove your personal information from Google’ hub ( www.snipca.com/39599) for advice about the type of content you want removed, and instructions on how to proceed. You’ll need to provide your legal name, the name that finds the page you want delisted (if different), the URL and the reason for removal.
Bear in mind that you’re only making a request and not issuing a legal demand (see next tip for more on this). Google says it will provide a “brief explanation” if your request is denied, and let you re-submit it if you have “additional materials to support your case”.
Remove personal content from other Google tools
Google is more likely to take your removal request seriously if it’s for legal reasons, especially if content that “violates the law or your rights” is hosted on one of its own services. These reasons may include copyright infringement, defamation and – most pertinently for this feature – privacy intrusion, as well as phishing, violent threats and explicit material.
To report content you want removed from Google under “applicable laws”, visit its legal troubleshooter tool at www. snipca.com/39596 and select the relevant service. The list covers everything from Google Search (see screenshot left), Photos and Youtube to Blogger, Google Maps and Drive. Specify your reason for reporting from the options provided – for example, ‘content contains my personal information’ – click ‘Create request’ and enter as much information as you can about the data you want deleted.
Google says it may send a copy of your request to the Lumen project ( www. lumendatabase.org), which analyses legal requests for the removal of online material, but promises that your contact details will be redacted.
Hide your Facebook profile in Google results
Because Facebook (unlike Twitter) requires you to use your real name, anyone who Googles you will be able to find your profile and posts in a matter of seconds. You can prevent this from happening by tweaking your Facebook privacy settings to make your profile less public.
On your PC, click the down arrow in the top-right corner of the Facebook website and choose ‘Settings & Privacy’, then Settings, and click Privacy in the menu on the left. In the ‘Your activity’ section, click the Edit button next to ‘Who can see your future posts?’ and change the setting from Public to Friends ( 1 in our screenshot above right). Click the Limit Past Posts button next to ‘Limit The Audience for Old Posts on Your Timeline’ to stop anyone apart from your friends viewing content on your timeline.
Finally, in the ‘How people can find and contact you section’, click the Edit link next to ‘Do you want search engines outside Facebook to link to your profile?’ and deselect the ‘Allow search engines outside of Facebook to link to your Profile’ option 2 . Click Turn Off 3 to confirm and Facebook will block Google from showing your profile in search results for your name, though it may take a few days for this to take effect.
Stop your home appearing on Google Street View
Most of us have looked up our homes on Street View in Google Maps, but you may not want other people seeing where you live. Whether you want to protect your privacy, you’re worried about burglars or your front garden looked messy when the photo was taken, you can ask Google to blur your home. Just search for your postcode in Google Maps, drag the yellow peg man on to the marker to switch to Street View and click the tiny ‘Report a problem’ link in the bottom-right corner.
Click and drag the image so that your house appears within the red rectangle, then select ‘My home’( 1 in our screenshot below left) in the ‘Request blurring’ options 2 – these also let you blur cars and faces, though Street View should do the latter automatically. Enter additional information to help Google blur the correct property, then enter your email address and click Submit. The blur will be applied to your home within a few days, but be aware that this is permanent and you can’t reverse it later.
Bury bad content about you in Google search results
If neither the owner of a site nor Google will help you remove personal info from search results, there are lots of online services that promise to make the
undesirable content more difficult to find. There’s nothing particularly clever about how these companies work: they simply help you create a more positive online presence through blog posts, socialmedia profiles and personal websites, then use Search Engine Optimisation
( SEO) to drive traffic to that content, pushing the negative stuff further down Google’s search results. Brandyourself ( https://brandyourself.
com, see screenshot right) is one of the best known services and claims to specialise in helping individuals deal with unwanted Google results, including court documents, press coverage and photos. However, it’s expensive, with prices starting from £300 per month, so not worth the money unless you need a lot of negative content fixed. Brandyourself offers a free reputation report to identify if your online presence is “hurting you”, but we didn’t find this accurate: our test search for ‘Darren Brown’ found results for the illusionist Derren Brown!
Rather than pay a company to clean up your reputation, you can try some of its tricks for free by creating new socialmedia profiles and editing existing ones, making sensible posts on consumerreview sites and forums under your real name, and sharing as much content publicly as you can that proves what a good, honest person you are.