I recently discovered that my phone number was appearing online on a participant list for a meeting I attended a couple of years ago. I learned this because a marketer cold called me and mentioned how they got my number.
I contacted the meeting organizers and told them to remove the document. They took it down fairly quickly a few days ago, but when I do a Google search on my phone number, the link to the document still comes up. When I click on the link, I get an error message saying that the document is no longer there. So that is good. But I don’t like that the link is still appearing, and in fact, the 2-line preview is still showing my phone number and my name.
Why is this still appearing? Is there anything the meeting organizers can do to get the search result links removed?
In my experience, once your info is out on the internet, there really is no way to delete it. You may get it off this or that call list or database but the number remains out there and will end-up on dozens of others. A game of whack-a-mole (heh) you can never win.
Some phones (like Pixel) have good built in spam protection. There are also apps you can use that help with this (I have no recommendations, maybe others can advise).
Some crud always gets through though.
thanks. Yeah, I know that taking down the document won’t erase my number from the list that the marketer used, or the lists of whoever they shared it with, but at least the original document will be gone.
I was just wondering how long it would be until the traces of that document would stop appearing in a Google search (and I had the same results from Safari).
There are ways to request for Google to refresh the search crawl (which should remove outdated or missing data from the cached view), and also ways to request the removal of personal data that appears in a search:
https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/3111061
Of course if other search engines are also caching it, this won’t remove it from there, and there’s also the Wayback Machine that keeps copies of a lot of online content - in theory, it should be possible to make a ‘right to be forgotten’ request to archive.org to deal with that, but I have tried, and they just ignored me.
thanks. I just submitted a request.
Do you have any idea how long the old search results will hang around on their own? Days? Weeks? Months?
It took a couple of weeks when I submitted one to Google; I had to submit it a couple of times because it was something on Twitter and there was some confusion as Twitter has been redirected to X (so parts of the Google system just couldn’t comprehend that the thing I was requesting refreshed wasn’t at the same URL as in the cache); each request cycle took a couple of weeks, so that seems to be the turnaround.
Natural expiry of cached items on search engines is going to be wildly variable based on how often they crawl, but also, I think there is a tendency for stuff to stick around longer in the cache if the original page has simply gone, because their crawler might just assume it was temporarily unavailable.
There are too many people in the chain to keep any info private, and that info goes fast, and that info is sold for money. Unless you can get in at the start and offer more money than they could get otherwise, you are probably SOL, sorry. As has been said many times before, on the internet you are not a customer-you are a product, and sometimes a supposed “Do Not Disturb” list is created for the sole purpose of confirming previously gathered data.
You can ask Google to remove your contact information from its search results here: Find and remove personal contact info in Google Search results - Google Search Help. If you have a Google account you can even set notifications for when new results about you appear.
thanks. I would like to try this, but I am not able to find the Manage Results About Option either through the Google app on my phone or through the account settings on my laptop. Frustrating!
And as for the other suggestions, first I tried to Refresh Outdated Content, but this was rejected for the following reason:
You requested that a non-functional page be removed from search results, but the page still exists, and is accessible by Google. Requests to the Remove Outdated Content tool can succeed only when the page is no longer available.
This is correct because, while the organisation had removed the document, the page where they had kept the publication is still there.
Then I tried asking for the search result to be removed because it is showing personal information. This was also rejected with the following message:
Your personal information in the following page(s) is publicly available on a government or university website or on a website which republishes this information, hence we cannot remove it from search results according to our policies.
So I guess I am stuck waiting for the refresh to happen naturally…