Question

Go and “Google” yourself and see what information is available on you. How much did you find? Was it more or less than what you expected or were there some surprises? Is there any inaccurate or unauthorized information? If hypothetically you found some information returned by your search that you wanted to remove, how would you go about doing that? Explain

Answer 1

Even if I go on “Google” and see what information is available on me, I realize that the search returns mostly the results that I expected. I was very active during my college days into various forms of college activities. I remember one or two newspapers covering my interviews as well. So the search results returned that. I anyway had hard copies of such newspapers so that it was pleasant to see my name on Google. Besides, since I use the social media sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, my accounts were also featured on Google. However, if I wish, I could turn the settings of my social media sites as ‘private’ so that Google cannot show my profile. Besides, I was only shocked to see that my Management school had uploaded a PDF file on their official website that contained the names, addresses and contact details of all its students who have got enrolled to the last year’s management batch. They did not keep the information private and hence, Google drew information from such a website and returned my name with complete contact details. Now, only this part was little disturbing. I contacted my college authorities and they got me in touch with the content manager of the college’s website. Once the content manager was convinced with my concern, the college authorities asked the manager to immediately change the privacy settings and make the information accessible to only the members of the websites who log in using the password and username. In this manner, I helped eliminating my name from the Google search results. I realized, in general, one can contact the authorities of the hosting website with the concerns and in most of the cases, it may get sorted out at that point itself, failing which, legal actions against such websites or webpages could be taken from my end.