SECURITY UPDATE: When someone types your name on Google, you will be automatically notified

Home / Uncategorized / SECURITY UPDATE: When someone types your name on Google, you will be automatically notified

We were fortunate enough to get on one of the Beta teams. The tool is expected to be released in the U.S. within the next few months, and then an international deployment in 2023.

 

BY:

Cassandra Este
Social Media Analyst 

PROJECT COUNSEL MEDIA

4 October 2022 (San Francisco, California) – If someone types your name on Google, the web giant will now be able to warn you.

Google is finally tackling the right to be forgotten … and the management of its online information. Last week the search engine announced several measures to strengthen the security and integrity of its users online. We have been working with the tool since the summer. It will be easier to monitor information about yourself, as well as delete information about yourself. It will also be possible to be alerted in case of nominative research.

Basically, if a user searches for your name, phone number or address (press articles will be excluded from the system), Google will be able to alert you provided that you have previously activated a dedicated tool. The following video gives you a rough look at how the alert system will work:

 

Once alerted, it will then be possible for the user concerned to ask for the removal of the information concerned, as a direct application of the right to be forgotten – which for the moment is more of an abstract concept than a real applicable text and treated differently in the U.S., Europe and other parts of the world. And, of course, Google does not have control over the entire web. The information can be removed from search engines, but not from the page that hosts it. As Google noted in a press release:

“Even if we remove a content from Google search, it is possible that it still exists on the web”.

Also, there remains only one real solution to make a photo or video disappear:

“contact the webmaster of the site and ask him to delete the content”

That’s a real admission of weakness for the Mountain View company, but above all a hard blow for those confronted with defamatory, erroneous or simply obsolete content. But Google actually does have a technology in the works to address that issue. More in a subsequent post.

However, this initiative already marks a first significant step: Google is – by far – the most used search engine in the world. To remove an information from its pages is therefore to make it inaccessible for the majority of the Internet users in the world.

For the moment, only a handful of users have access to this new tool. It is expected to be released in the U.S. in the coming months, with a definitive international deployment at the beginning of next year.

If you ever need/want to follow what Google is doing/what products it is testing/what things it has in the pipeline, I suggest you follow them on Twitter via Google’s SearchLiaison via @searchliaison

 

 

Related Posts
Comments
pingbacks / trackbacks
  • […] article from Project Counsel Media (SECURITY UPDATE: When someone types your name on Google, you will be automatically notified, written by Cassandra Este) notes that Google is finally tackling the right to be forgotten … and […]