How Do I Remove My Personal Information From the Web?

It is never a bad time for someone to take internet privacy into his or her own hands and remove personal information from the web.

Search engines & Search results

People who are using the internet often should be aware that their personal information (medical and financial records, financial accounts, health insurance details) and other important details are available to the public and can be found using search engines and appearing on google’s search results pages or other search engines.

For those individuals who want to restrict their appearance on the internet, there is an option for them to remove part of the information that companies collect like personal info and other personal details and personal information stored.

You will need to be informed that removing every bit of information about you from the internet is not going to be possible, simply because a lot of different people and websites are holding that information and the process of removing them is time-consuming and cannot guarantee that everything will be deleted as you probably wish.

However, in case you decide to take the next step you will be able to minimize your digital footprint and that will definitely lower the chances that someone will release personally identifying information about you.

Removing your personal information from the internet may restrict your ability to communicate with other people and potential employers for example. However, it will definitely bring you a lot of benefits since you are not going to appear on data broker websites and on google search results so often.

Because of this reason, you will need to spend some time and decide what personally identifiable information you would like to remove and what is the best way to do that.

Removing your personal information from the internet

As we already mentioned, the process of removing your personal information from the internet will be time-consuming and you shouldn’t expect to finish everything in one day. It is advisable to make a systematic approach and detailed plan in order to get positive results faster.

Social Media Accounts

The best and fastest approach here will be if you make a list of all social media accounts that you own at the moment. Once you make your list you will need to go and visit every account, find the account settings and find the option to remove or deactivate the account.

It is a personal preference, but if you want to take an extra step in keeping your personal information safe you can also delete your credit card saved forms and online banking accounts.

Personal sites and blogs

Any personal blogs that you are running at the moment can contain details about your daily life, health and financial information, family, jobs, and much more. Those are information that can be taken by fraudsters that are selling them to data brokers. In case you write and publish blogs be sure what kind of details you are sharing.

If another person is sharing sensitive information about you on a third-party website, you can contact the webmaster and ask them to remove the information. In case they refuse to remove it you have an option to send a request to Google and ask them to remove it.

Unnecessary apps on your tablet and phone

Your tablet collect personal details, additionally many mobile applications that we are using are collecting your personal data such as your name, geographical location, spending habits, and email addresses.

In case of data breaches the personal contact information online can be easily stolen and if they end up in the wrong hands your personal information and financial records may be at risk.

If you are not sure what kind of information those mobile apps are collecting you can always go and review their Terms of Use and Privacy Notice.

Once you decide which application you are going to remove, you can remove all your info and delete your application (privacy and account settings) and in case there are some additional problems you can always contact the app provider and ask them to remove your information.

Do-not-track feature

Everyone that is browsing the internet is familiar and noticed disclaimers about “cookies”. This is the technology that tracks your web browsing habits and if you don’t want that information to be stored and tracked you can run security software that will be able to block online tracking.

Clean your browsing data and history

Your browser is keeping a lot of personal information about you and everything you have searched, every password you wrote and all downloaded images and files are visible in your browser history.

In case any cybercriminal gain access to your personal computer he will be able to collect that information from your web browsing history without any problem.

Be sure that you regularly clean your browser history, delete your cookies and take other steps if necessary (install security software).

Removing your personal information from Google

Once you start using the internet and sharing your information, as time passes it is getting spread all over the internet and after some time it will probably appear on Google as well. There are some options and processes that will enable you to send a removal request form to Google about certain search results.

There is some news because in April Google added some additional categories of information that you can request to be removed from the internet space such as physical addresses and phone numbers.

Which information can be removed from Google Search?

Google is not going to respond to every single request about removal, and they will consider only search results that are revealing someone’s personal details such as:

• Personal contact information – Email address, telephone number, physical address.
• Information that can lead to identity theft – Credit cards, bank account numbers, signature images.
• Details that can bring the risk of hacker attacks – Login IDs, passwords.
• Other confidential information and medical records.
• “Irrelevant pornography” related to your name.

How do I get Google to remove something from search?

Removing your search link from Google isn’t going to be done automatically. Because of that reason, you will need to send a removal request to Google including URLs of all pages and websites that have your personal information published together with the search pages that are showing those results and links. Google may also request from you a screenshot of the information that you want to be removed.

Once you send your request, Google will evaluate it and they will take into account if the removal process is going to limit the access to that public information or it won’t if that information is “broadly useful” similar to a news article. If that information is broadly useful and doesn’t contain any personal information Google is not going to remove it.

You will get notified about every action that Google is going to take and it all depends on the content and context of the material. Maybe Google will decide to remove all the links from search results or just those searches and links that include your name only.

For additional protection, you can always contact your internet service provider or install internet security that will keep your stored account information and will track where your personal information land.

To learn more about how you can protect your internet privacy and remove personal information from the web, contact RemovePersonalInformation today by dialing 844-445-6096 .