How to remove your phone number or address from Google search results

The change comes as concerns intensify about the connection between online privacy and real-life safety. This month, stalker forum Kiwi Farms was taken down after forum members spent years harassing women and those who identify as LGBTQ, frequently posting their physical addresses and phone numbers. Victims of domestic abuse are also at risk when their personal information appears online. Some jurisdictions, including the European Union, have adopted a “right to be forgotten,” which grants people the right to ask for their personal information to be deleted from company databases or the internet, but the United States hasn’t adopted such a law.

In addition to requesting the removal of search results, starting early next year people can sign up for alerts if their personal information appears in new results, Google says.

“Even though removing these results doesn’t scrub your contact information from the web overall, we’re doing everything we can to safeguard your information on Google Search,” Danny Sullivan, Google’s public liaison for search, said in a statement.

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Here’s how to ask for a result to be removed: In the Google app or Chrome browser, tap or click on the three dots next to a search result. A window titled “about this result” should pop up. Scroll to the bottom and select the “remove result” button. After you fill out a removal form, your request will take a few days to process, Google says. You can check the status by tapping on your profile icon in the top right corner and selecting “results about you.”

Mass data collection by companies and the government has made it increasingly difficult for targets of harassment or abuse to keep their personal information off the internet, says Alejandra Caraballo, an instructor at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic. Even if people remove their personal information from search results, it’s still probably available for purchase from data brokers, companies that amass and sell huge amounts of personal data.

“This [Google tool] is still kind of in the early stages, and it remains to be seen how effective it is,” said Caraballo. “A lot of this information is still available through data brokers, and that kind of freewheeling sharing of people’s personal information in bulk is something that needs to be looked at by federal regulators.”

Scrubbing your information from data broker sites requires either time to submit dozens of data deletion requests or money to pay a third-party service such as DeleteMe to do it for you. So while Google’s new…