How to Remove Your Social Security Number from Google

When it comes to protecting our personal information, we don’t really do enough. We trust technology too easily, and we often trust ourselves to not lose or compromise our sensitive information. When it comes to the safety of your personal information, download dfndr security and implement the anti-theft feature to ensure that your device is safe in the event of loss or theft:

Once you’ve enabled the anti-theft feature, you’ll be able to remotely block intruders from accessing your phone, erase all of your data, sound an alarm, or track your phone.

Further, did you know your social security number might be on Google? While this isn’t a breach, some users have found that their information is available online and just search away. While this may sound like an episode of Black Mirror, this sort of situation can be easily preventable.

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Identify Where the Information Is From
For many, this happens in horror. They find their information online and are totally unsure as to what to do. The first step you should take is to contact Google about removing your SSN. Any sensitive information, or information posted without your consent, can be removed from search results. This includes both images and links to external web pages.

Contact the Webmaster
However, this may not be enough to prevent your information from appearing online. If the result was posted on a smaller blog or website, you’d need to contact the individual webmaster to ensure that the content is not available online. But this can be up to the discrepancy of the webmaster, who may not always be available for contact. This can then be a stressful process, waiting for replies and going back and forth to make sure that your information is removed from the current (and any archived) versions of the website.

Hope for the Best
Should the webmaster take it down, all you can do is hope that nobody noticed or stored the information in their personal files. The scariest part of this is that many can write down this information and hold onto it until they need the information, which means you could be vulnerable for a longer period of time than you think.

While it’s possible — and recommended — to remove your personal information from the Internet, it may not be enough to monitor on your own. If you store any sensitive information on your phone, be sure to use anti-theft to protect your personal information.