The internet is a big, sometimes tremendously scary place, and your personal information is floating around in it. Google is rolling out a tool to help you keep a lid on your sensitive contact information, building on an older feature that required some legwork. Now, all you have to do is tell Google to keep an eye out in case something suspicious pops up.
Last year, Google released the "Results about you" dashboard in account activity settings, a convoluted but necessary tool that gives you access to all the data being piped into your Google account. The personal results page lets you track requests to remove personal search links, but requesting a removal required you to search for yourself and then report results manually. The new dashboard will skip that step.
If you have a personal Google account, the company already has your contact information. All you have to do is confirm (or add it) and then let Google continuously search the web. The dashboard will pull up results that include your contact information, giving you a chance to preview the page. If you believe a result is making unauthorized use of your personal information, you can request a removal right from the preview.
Even better, the new personal results dashboard will have a notification option. So, you don't even have to remember to visit the page. You'll just get a ping when Google detects your information has appeared on a website. It's similar to the way Google One subscribers are notified when their personal data appears on the dark web. As with the manual requests, the results hub will track all your removal requests, which Google does not guarantee it will grant.
Google doesn't have any control over websites that might be hosting your personal data—despite appearances, Google does not technically run the internet. So, that website will continue to invade your privacy, but removing the result from Google's search results will make it much harder to find. It's not a perfect system, but it's better than nothing. Google says the updated "Results about you" dashboard will roll out in the coming days; you can access it by digging around in the labyrinthian account privacy settings or bookmark the URL.
