How to Remove Your Personal Information from Google Search

— and that's when I realized my phone number was sitting right there on the first page of Google. Not buried on page six where nobody looks. Page one. Third result. Some random directory site I'd never even heard of had my full name, my mobile number, an old Koramangala address from when I was renting there in 2022, and — this is the part that genuinely creeped me out — a photo pulled from a LinkedIn profile I hadn't updated in two years.

So yeah, that's how my weekend project started. I'd been telling other people to google themselves for ages. Finally did it myself. And the results were, to put it mildly, not great.

Let me walk you through what I found and what I did about it, because I think my experience is probably pretty similar to what most Indians would run into if they actually sat down and searched for themselves. Grab some chai. This gets tedious in the middle but the payoff is worth it.

The Initial Damage Assessment

I searched four things: my full name, my phone number, my primary email address, and my name plus the city I live in. Between those four searches, here's what turned up.

My name brought up my LinkedIn profile (expected), an old Medium article I'd written (fine), a couple of mentions in company press releases (okay), and then three results that bothered me. One was that directory site with my phone and address. Another was an ancient Quora answer I'd posted under my real name back in 2019 where I'd mentioned my workplace. The third was a cached version of a Facebook post from a friend who'd tagged me at a restaurant with a location pin.

My phone number search was worse. Truecaller had it, obviously. But there were also two other "people search" sites — the kind that aggregate public data and create profiles you never consented to. One of them listed my phone number alongside my name and approximate age. The other had my number linked to an old address and what appeared to be a partial Aadhaar number, though I still don't know where they got that.

My email search turned up a data breach dump. A site called HaveIBeenPwned had already flagged my email in three breaches, but I hadn't realized the leaked data was also indexed by some sketchy "check if your email was leaked" sites that were basically just displaying the breached records for anyone to see. My email, a hashed password, and the services I'd been using — all there in a nicely formatted table.

The name-plus-city search brought up a couple of electoral roll entries from government databases that had been scraped and rehosted on third-party sites. My voter ID details, my father's name, my local address. This data is technically public in India, but seeing it pop up on a commercial website that's running ads against your personal information hits differently.

Starting With Google's Own Tools

Google actually has a pretty decent tool for this now. It wasn't always the case — a few years back, you basically had to fill out a long legal form and pray. But as of 2025, they've built something called "Results About You" that lives inside your Google account settings. You can also find it by searching "Google remove personal information" and clicking the support page.

Here's what the tool lets you request removal for. Phone numbers, email addresses, physical addresses. Bank account and credit card numbers (if those show up in search results, you've got bigger problems, but the option exists). Government IDs — Aadhaar, PAN, passport numbers. Login credentials that appear in breach dumps. Explicit images shared without consent. And doxxing content that exposes your personal info with intent to harm.

I submitted three removal requests that Saturday afternoon. One for the directory site showing my phone number and address. One for the breach dump site showing my email and password hash. And one for the electoral roll scraper site.

The process itself was straightforward. You pick the type of information, paste the URL of the page, take a screenshot showing the personal data, and submit. Each request took maybe five minutes. Google says they review requests within a few business days, and in my case, the first two came back approved within four days. The electoral roll one took nearly two weeks and required me to submit additional information explaining why the data exposure was harmful.

Result? Those three pages stopped appearing in Google Search results. But — and this is the part people miss — the information was still on those websites. Google's tool removes search results. It doesn't delete anything from the source. If someone visits that directory site directly, or if they search on Bing or DuckDuckGo, my data still shows up. Google's removal is like pulling a book off the library shelf while leaving copies in every other library in town.

Dealing With Truecaller (The Most Annoying One)

Truecaller is probably the single biggest source of phone number exposure for Indians. Over 400 million users, and the way it works is that everyone who installs the app basically uploads their entire contact list to Truecaller's database. So even if you've never used Truecaller yourself, your name and number are in there because someone who has your number installed the app.

Unlisting yourself from Truecaller takes about two minutes, but it's deliberately not obvious. Here's what to do. Go to truecaller.com/unlisting. Enter your phone number with the country code (+91). Complete the verification. Your listing gets removed within 24 hours.

What they don't tell you on that page: if even one Truecaller user adds you as a new contact after you've unlisted, your number can reappear in their database. So unlisting isn't a permanent fix. I've had to re-unlist twice in the past eight months. It's annoying but it takes less time than making instant coffee, so I just do it every few months now.

There are also Truecaller alternatives that have your data — apps like CallerID, Mobile Number Tracker, and various Indian-specific caller identification apps. Most of them don't have easy unlisting processes. Some of them don't have unlisting processes at all. For those, you're stuck filing DPDP Act data erasure requests, which I'll get to.

The People-Search Sites

Those two random people-search directories that had my phone number? One of them had a "Privacy" link buried at the very bottom of the page, in grey text on a slightly lighter grey background. Definitely not trying to be found. Clicking it took me to a form where I could request data removal by providing my full name, the URL of my profile on their site, and a government ID for "verification." I wasn't thrilled about handing them more personal data to prove I wanted them to delete my existing personal data, but that's how it works.

I submitted the request. Heard nothing for three weeks. Sent a follow-up email threatening to file a complaint with the Data Protection Board of India under the DPDP Act. Got a response within two days saying my data had been removed. Make of that what you will.

The second directory site had no contact information, no privacy policy, and was registered through a domain privacy service in Panama. For that one, I went straight to Google's removal tool (which worked for search results) and then filed an abuse report with the hosting provider, which I identified by doing a WHOIS lookup on the domain. The hosting provider took the site down entirely about six weeks later, though I doubt my report was the only one they received.

Social Media Cleanup

This part was honestly the most time-consuming, not because it's technically difficult but because social media platforms have buried their privacy controls under seventeen layers of menus, and every platform does it differently.

Facebook. I went to Settings, then Privacy, then "How People Find and Contact You" and turned off the option for search engines outside Facebook to link to my profile. That stops Google from indexing my Facebook page. Then I went through my tagged photos — all of them, going back years — and untagged myself from anything I didn't want publicly associated with my name. Removed my phone number from my profile entirely. Changed my birthday visibility to "Only Me." Set my friends list to private. It took about 45 minutes because I'd been on Facebook since 2012 and there was a lot of accumulated junk.

LinkedIn. This one's trickier because the platform is, by design, meant to be public. But you can still control quite a bit. I went to Settings, then Visibility, then "Edit your public profile" and removed my photo, phone number, and specific job details from the public view. Left just my name, headline, and industry visible. Also turned off "Profile discovery using email address" and "Profile discovery using phone number." The old photo that directory site had scraped? It came from my LinkedIn public profile. Once I removed it from the public view, the directory's cached version eventually stopped displaying it too.

Instagram. Switched to a private account. This is a bigger deal than it sounds, because I had a public account for years and Google had indexed some of my posts. Even after going private, those cached results hung around for a couple of months before Google's crawler eventually dropped them. If you want faster removal, you can submit a Google removal request for the specific cached URLs.

Twitter/X. I'd barely used it, but my real name was on the profile. Changed the display name to something generic, removed my bio, and turned on "Protect your posts." Again, cached results took a while to disappear from Google.

Quora. That old answer I'd posted? I deleted it entirely. But Quora has a weird thing where deleted answers can still appear in Google's cache for weeks. I submitted a Google removal request for the cached page specifically, and it was gone within a few days.

The DPDP Act Route

India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act gives you the right to request erasure of your personal data from any Indian company that's processing it. In theory, this is powerful. In practice, as of early 2026, the enforcement mechanism is still being set up. The Data Protection Board isn't fully operational for individual complaints yet.

But here's the thing: the Act exists, and companies know it exists. Mentioning it in a removal request adds weight. I used a template email that went roughly like this: "I am writing to exercise my right to erasure under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. Your platform currently displays the following personal data associated with my identity: [list the data]. I request that this data be deleted from your systems within 30 days. Failure to comply may result in a formal complaint to the Data Protection Board of India."

I sent variations of this to seven different sites and services. Five responded within two weeks and removed my data. One never responded (the Panama-registered directory). One — a data aggregation company — responded with a lengthy email explaining that they were "processing my request in accordance with applicable laws" and then did nothing for a month until I followed up again.

The DPDP Act is more useful as a stick than as a formal legal channel right now. But it's a real stick, and companies are paying attention to it.

Google Alerts: The Ongoing Part

Removing your data from the internet isn't a one-time project. It's maintenance. New databases scrape old sources. Archived copies resurface. Someone tags you in a new post. A company you forgot about sells your data to a broker you've never heard of.

So I set up Google Alerts for my full name, my phone number, and my primary email address. Every time Google indexes a new page containing any of those, I get an email notification. I've been running these alerts for about three months now. I've gotten maybe six alerts total, four of which were false positives (other people with similar names) and two of which were real — my email showing up on yet another breach aggregation site, and my name appearing in the attendee list of a conference that posted its participant directory publicly without asking.

Both times, I submitted Google removal requests and contacted the source sites. Took maybe twenty minutes total. It's not a huge burden, but it does require you to actually act on the alerts when they come in instead of ignoring them.

Google also has the "Results About You" dashboard now, which proactively monitors search results for your name, email, and phone number and alerts you when new results appear. It's Google Alerts but specifically tuned for personal data exposure. I'd recommend setting up both — they catch slightly different things.

De-Indexing vs. Deletion

A distinction that confused me at first: de-indexing and deletion are different things. When you ask Google to remove a result, that's de-indexing. The page still exists at its original URL. Anyone who has the direct link can still see it. Other search engines will still show it.

Deletion means getting the content removed from the source website entirely. That requires contacting the website owner, which might be easy (a simple opt-out form) or nearly impossible (an anonymous site hosted offshore).

Ideally, you want both. De-index from Google for immediate relief, then pursue deletion from the source for permanent removal. In practice, I got full deletion from about four out of seven sources. The others, I settled for Google de-indexing and just monitor periodically to make sure the data doesn't resurface elsewhere.

The Right to Be Forgotten — Sort Of

India doesn't have a formal "right to be forgotten" in the way the EU does under GDPR. The DPDP Act has data erasure provisions, but they're narrower — they cover data that's no longer necessary for the purpose it was collected for, not a blanket "remove everything about me" right.

Indian courts have recognized a right to be forgotten in some cases, particularly involving old criminal records and intimate content. The Karnataka High Court and Kerala High Court have both issued orders directing search engines to de-index specific results. These are case-specific rulings, not a general right you can invoke, but they establish a direction. If your situation involves particularly harmful exposure — intimate images, defamatory content, identity theft materials — a legal route through the courts is an option worth considering, though it's slow and expensive.

For most people dealing with garden-variety data exposure (phone numbers, addresses, old social media posts), the self-service approach I've described here will cover 90% of what needs to be done. The legal route is for the remaining cases where the stakes are higher and the sources aren't cooperating.

What About Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Others?

I almost forgot about this part, which is ironic because it's important. Google's removal tool only removes results from Google. Bing has its own content removal tool at bing.com/webmaster/tools/contentremoval. DuckDuckGo sources its results from Bing, so removing from Bing typically covers DuckDuckGo too. Yahoo Search also relies on Bing's index. So you really need to submit removal requests to both Google and Bing to cover most of the search traffic in India.

I submitted Bing removal requests for the same three URLs. The process was similar to Google's, and removal happened within about a week. Slightly less polished interface, but it works.

So Here's Your One Next Step

If you've read this far and you haven't actually googled yourself yet, do that. Right now, or this weekend. Search your full name. Search your phone number (with +91 and without). Search your primary email address. Search your name plus your city. Spend fifteen minutes just seeing what's out there. You might find nothing alarming, in which case you can relax a bit. Or you might find what I found — your life spread across a dozen sites you've never visited, scraped and re-scraped and packaged up for anyone to browse. Either way, knowing is better than not knowing. And if the results are bad, you've got a roadmap now. Start with Google's "Results About You" tool, because it's the fastest win. Everything else flows from there.