Google has introduced a new tool for Australian users, ‘Results about you’. 

This tool, unveiled during Privacy Awareness Week, allows people to monitor how their personal information appears in search results and to request its removal. 

The tool enables users to identify and remove specific details like phone numbers, email addresses, and home addresses that appear in Google's search results. 

To address ongoing privacy concerns, users can also subscribe to alerts notifying them of new search results that include their personal information.

Lucinda Longcroft, the director of government affairs and public policy for Google Australia, says the tool will help protect individuals from various online threats, including doxing and financial fraud. 

“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,” Longcroft says.

This initiative aligns with broader privacy reforms in Australia, including recent government legislation to combat doxing. 

Google's ‘Results about you’ tool first appeared in the US in 2022, and since then, the company says it has removed over a million links following ‘right to be forgotten’ requests, though it has faced challenges in regions outside the EU.

Keith Enright, Google's chief privacy officer, says legal rights to remove information should extend to the publishers hosting the content rather than the search engines. 

“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,” Enright says. 

The new tool can be accessed via Google's mobile app or directly through a browser using specific instructions provided by Google. 

More details are accessible here.