If you are tired of getting phone calls and postcards from randos who want to buy your house or sell you stuff you don’t want, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is they are probably getting your phone number and home address just by searching Google. The good news is, there is a process to get your personal contact information removed from Google. In this blog post, I will walk you through the process.
Why you should Google yourself occasionally
If you are not in the habit of searching for yourself on Google, you may be in for an unpleasant surprise. It had been a couple of years since I had searched on my own name, and I was pretty appalled at what I found. Much of the information was outdated, and some of it was slightly incorrect, but there were enough different companies offering to sell my information and giving enough different elements of it away for free that it’s no wonder I get spam phone calls and texts and postcards. My tricks to defeat robocalls on cellular and landline phones work well, but not so much for random solicitations.
I can’t necessarily stop the companies who collect these mountains of information about me. I suppose I could take down their information and try to send them a cease and thesis, but that doesn’t mean they will necessarily honor it.
But what I can do is stop them from giving away that information for free to anyone who happens to search for me on Google. The trick is getting Google to remove that page from their index. And believe me, after Google removes a page from their index, the traffic drops considerably.
Preparing your Google takedown request
Google makes it pretty easy to submit a takedown request, but I kept getting errors when I did it. Here’s how I fixed them.
If your web browser has any type of privacy or ad blocking extension enabled, Google just throws an error message when you try to remove a result. So to do this process, either use a browser that doesn’t have any of those extensions enabled, or temporarily disabled those extensions.
Start by searching on your name and city
Once you have a browser with ad blocking and privacy disabled, do a Google search on yourself. Start by searching on your name and city. You’ll see why in a minute.
There will be some random stuff, but there will be some stuff that makes you uncomfortable. I found one page that seemed to have information on me going back to the 1990s, in addition to current information that was far too accurate for my liking.
Getting your personal contact information removed from Google
If you hover over the title of the search result, a 3-dot menu appears. Click that menu, and one of the options is to remove the information from Google.
Google will ask for a reason. Stating that it is personally identifiable information is enough. Google will then make you fill out the information that appears on the page. You just need to enter your name and one of the pieces of information on the page. In my experience you don’t have to match it exactly, like omitting or adding a period after my middle initial, or abbreviating “Drive” or not. But the better you match it, the less likely you are to get it rejected on a technicality. If enough people start doing this, Google may get less lenient.
Methodically go through the results and submit take down requests for each.
Searching for your address and phone numbers
Then, if you are really brave, search for your address and repeat the takedown process.
I will leave it up to you to decide if you want to search on your old phone numbers and old addresses and do the same thing. The presence of outdated and no longer accurate information about you erodes the confidence in the data. But on the other hand, the company with outdated information on you may also have correct information on you. And you may prefer not having anyone advertising anything that they have on you.
It takes a day or so for Google to get back with you, and in the event they deny any of your take down requests, search again, and resubmit, making sure to match all of the details exactly. But in my case, I got more than 20 pages with my personal information removed from Google.
And if you’re like me, you will probably see a decrease in the number of junk phone calls and spam postcards you receive after that.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.