Google is testing notification when user contact details appear in search engines

Google has started offering a new feature in the US that will automatically notify users when their contact information appears online. The company wants to release the function in other countries and languages ​​later, although it is not known whether the Benelux is also included.

The new feature is part of the Results about you dashboard, which is not yet available in the Benelux. This dashboard already allowed users to submit deletion requests when they came across their data online and wanted it deleted.

Now Google also automatically reports when a website appears in the search engine that contains potentially sensitive contact information. This specifically includes email addresses, telephone numbers and home addresses. Users can then submit a deletion request directly through the dashboard.

For now, the Results about you feature is only available in beta in the United States. Outside of that, users can also submit removal requests via Google, but for users in the Benelux, this is done via a form, for example. They must therefore first come across or look up the information themselves. In the United States, Google can do this for the user.