Showing up in Google search results can be a blessing or a nightmare. The first case is more than obvious to the extent that an entire industry has emerged focused on improving the visibility of publications on search engine results pages. I’m talking about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), of course a thousand and one techniques (some completely clean and acceptable, others clearly questionable) to optimize what is published to gain visibility.

But, as I hinted at the beginning, it can also be a nightmare, as it is possible for a search engine to find and index some personal information that you do not wish to disclose. Obviously, there is an important distinction to be made here because public information about you (such as a report in which you are mentioned for any reason) is not the same as personal information that should not be disclosed.

In the first case, it is public information, Google respects the right to be forgotten, a regulation that was originally developed in the European Union and later spread to other geographies, that allows people, under certain circumstances, to request that the publications in question be excluded from the search results in which they appear. Although more complex, we can summarize it as whether the information we want to remove is “inaccurate, inappropriate, irrelevant or excessive” and whether there is a public interest in it continuing to appear in search results.

The procedure with private information is different, and also varies depending on its type, as we can see here. In all cases, of course, the common denominator is that the process of finding content and requesting its removal from Google search results is always initiated by the person concerned (or, of course, their legal representative).

However, it seems that this is about to change because, as we can read on CNBC, Google has quietly deployed a feature that can notify us of the presence of our personal data on the Internet and, if we wish, start the process of deindexing it.. At the moment yes, the feature seems to be available only in the United States and maybe some other region, but not in Spain at the moment. So if we try to access it using its URL, it loads a page saying “This tool is not yet available in your region”.

This new feature of Google is so interesting that it allows us to find out our personal data and from that moment It will be a search engine that automatically alerts us when it identifies any private data we previously configured. And when we receive a notification, along with the identified private data, we directly offer the possibility to start the process of deindexing it so that it does not appear again in the search results.