Google releases new tool to enable Australians to find their personal information and request removal

From Tuesday, Google will make ‘results about you’ tool available to Australians. Photograph: Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock

Google has released a new tool that enables Australian users to easily find search results containing their personal information and request its removal.

The “results about you” tool, available for the first time from Tuesday to coincide with Privacy Awareness Week, allows users to see how they show up in search results. They can then request the removal of results that contain personally identifiable information – such as phone numbers, emails or home addresses – via the Google app.

Users are also able to subscribe to alerts to find out if new results containing their personal information appear.

“Our hope is that tools like this will help Australians to better safeguard their information and identity online and help people to protect themselves from doxing as well as cyber and financial fraud,” the director of government affairs and public policy for Google Australia, Lucinda Longcroft, said in a statement.

In a blog post accompanying the announcement, Longcroft said Google will evaluate the content of the webpages sought to be removed “to ensure that we’re not limiting the availability of other information that is broadly useful, for instance in news articles”.

“And of course, removing contact information from Google search doesn’t remove it from the web, which is why you may wish to contact the hosting site directly, if you’re comfortable doing so.”

The feature was first rolled out in the US in 2022.

The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, last week announced the government would introduce legislation to outlaw the release of private information online with an intent to cause harm, known as doxing, as part of a wider reform of the Privacy Act.

Google said it supports the government’s efforts. The company has previously expressed reservations about countries outside the EU adopting “right to be forgotten”-style laws, after unsuccessfully challenging the laws in the EU. Google has removed more than 1m links in the past few years after receiving right to be forgotten requests.

As part of its response to a review of the Privacy Act, the federal government last year agreed in principle to a limited right to request a search engine to remove search results of the person’s name – excluding public reporting.

Google’s chief privacy officer, Keith Enright, told Guardian Australia in June last year that while Google is broadly supportive of the proposed reforms, the company believes search engines should not be singled out.

“We feel strongly that if you are creating a legal right to remove information from the internet, those requests should be directed to the publishers of that content rather than to search engines because, of course, even if it is suppressed from a search engine, that content still exists on the internet elsewhere,” he said.

“So a more effective way to answer the public policy objective … would be to create that legal obligation for the organisation that’s hosting the content.”