Google your own name today
Kudos to Google. The search giant has just given all of you a reason to go search your own name today. You may be horrified at what you find. But there’s a fix.
We’re talking the egregious leakage of personal contact information that finds it way from the nefarious disregard of the data harvesting industry into the public domain. “Seeing that others have published your personal information online can be stressful,” Google acknowledges, as it shares a solution that should have been available years ago.
From now, you can use Google’s “newly-redesigned Results about you tool” to scan search results for the personal contact details you tell it to look for, “like your phone number or address,” and then it can “help you quickly remove them.” Once you’ve done this, Google’s tool adds “ proactive monitoring… alerting you if new results are found.”
Results about you
When you use the tool, you’ll likely pause when you realize you’re giving Google — the world’s largest data machine — the very information you want removed. But the search giant assures that “Google uses the contact info you provide to check if it matches the information on a result’s web page. It’s not shared or used to personalize your experience across other Google products.”
The tool isn’t new — but almost no one knew it existed and it was not used nearly enough. While this won’t remove you from the countless marketeer and data harvester lists you’re undoubtedly on, it will make it harder to be found from cold. The proactive monitoring is especially useful, and I’d encourage you to set it up.
There’s a welcome shift to mask much of this information, albeit it’s too late to remove what’s already in databases. Identifiers such as cell numbers are particularly dangerous as they are often used for 2FA and are now driving new forms of malware and phishing (mishing) attacks. Thankfully the email and password combo that used to drive the threat is becoming less dangerous, as 2FA and soon passkeys become mandatory.
This tool and its simplicity are long overdue — check it out today.