Google will accept requests to remove any personal images from search engine results

Google announced this Friday a series of improvements focused on privacy and with which it hopes to offer users greater control over their personal data and protection against harmful content, among which is the possibility of requesting that images be removed from the search engine. Explicit personal images shared without your consent or knowledge or that you no longer want them to be visible.

The company recalled that in February of this year it announced a protection measure against explicit images in search results, which are blurred by default when they appear in the results. This tool is called Safe Search (SafeSearch) and serves to avoid all images that contain potentially harmful or sexual material, such as pornography or bloody or violent content.

Initially, this filter is automatically applied to accounts of underage users and those supervised by adults.

Google will accept requests to remove any personal images from search engine results

Now Google updated its policies on explicit personal images. Any user may request that any sexually explicit personal image that appears in it and that has been created and published without their consent be removed from the search engine.

In addition, users can also ask Google to remove such content that they no longer want to be visible in search results, as long as it is not currently being marketed. For example, content that was posted in the past was then deleted and republished without your consent.

In that sense, the company simplified the forms used to submit these content removal requests. With all that, he clarified that “removing content from Google Search does not remove it from the web or other search engines”, although he hopes that these changes “give the user more control over the private information that appears in Google Search ”.

results about you

Google also announced news related to the Results about you feature, which launched last year and is currently available in the United States, although it will arrive in new regions and with new languages ​​soon.

This is focused on making it easier for the user to request the removal of search results that contain personal data, which may be their personal phone number, address or email, among others.

The novelty, in this case, is that this tool now makes it possible to track this information, so that the search engine notifies its owners that it is available so that they can delete it.