Do you feel popular? There are people on the Internet who want to know all about you! Unfortunately, they don’t have the best of intentions, but Google has some handy tools to address that, and they’ve gotten an upgrade today. The “Results About You” tool can now detect and remove more of your personal information. Plus, the tool for removing non-consensual explicit imagery (NCEI) is faster to use. All you have to do is tell Google your personal details first—that seems safe, right?
With today’s upgrade, Results About You gains the ability to find and remove pages that include ID numbers like your passport, driver’s license, and Social Security. You can access the option to add these to Google’s ongoing scans from the settings in Results About You. Just click in the ID numbers section to enable detection.
Naturally, Google has to know what it’s looking for to remove it. So you need to provide at least part of those numbers. Google asks for the full driver’s license number, which is fine, as it’s not as sensitive. For your passport and SSN, you only need the last four digits, which is enough for Google to find the full numbers on webpages.
The NCEI tool is geared toward hiding real, explicit images as well as deepfakes and other types of artificial sexualized content. This kind of content is rampant on the Internet right now thanks to the rapid rise of AI. What used to require Photoshop skills is now just a prompt away, and some AI platforms hardly do anything to prevent it.
Google has made this tool easier to access and faster to report images. You can access it from the three-dot menu on any image that appears in Google’s search results. Just select “remove result” and “It shows a sexual image of me” to begin the removal process. Google will ask if it’s a real image or a deepfake. The compsany has added the option to add multiple images to a single request, which could save a lot of time if someone is using AI to churn out such content.
Sanitizing scans for safer search
Neither Results About You nor the NCEI tool will work instantly, and they can’t actually remove content from the Internet. But if Google approves the removal request, the content won’t appear in its search results, which is almost as good as not appearing on the Internet as far as most people are concerned.
After adding data to Results About You, Google intermittently scans for that data and will email you alerts so you can quickly remove results. That’s now an option for the NCII tool, too. If you enable it, Google’s system can monitor for new instances of the offending images. Google says it will “proactively filter out” these explicit results for you. This data will be integrated with the Results About You hub so you can see how often they appear.
The ID-number scanning is live in Results About You today. Meanwhile, the updated NCEI reporting will be available in the coming days. It will be available in “most countries” and will expand to more over time.
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