When people search for "delete my data from Google," they usually mean one of two things: delete the data Google has collected about me through Gmail, Maps, Search, and YouTube, or remove my personal information that appears in Google search results when someone Googles my name. These are fundamentally different problems requiring different solutions.
If you have a Google account, Google has collected a staggering amount of information about you. This includes every search you have ever made, every website you have visited through Chrome, every place you have been with Google Maps location history enabled, every email in Gmail, every YouTube video you have watched, every voice command you have given Google Assistant, and detailed advertising profiles based on all of the above.
1 Go to myaccount.google.com/data-and-privacy
2 Under "History settings," click Web & App Activity and turn it off. Then click "Manage all Web & App Activity" and delete your history.
3 Click Location History (now called Timeline) and turn it off. Delete your location history.
4 Click YouTube History and turn it off. Delete your watch and search history.
5 Go to adssettings.google.com and turn off ad personalization. This stops Google from building new advertising profiles based on your activity.
6 Go to myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols and turn off every activity control: Web & App Activity, Location History, YouTube History, and Ad Personalization.
7 Consider setting auto-delete for any activity you choose to keep. Google offers 3-month, 18-month, and 36-month auto-delete options.
The nuclear option: You can delete your entire Google account from myaccount.google.com — go to Data & Privacy, scroll to "More options," and select Delete your Google Account (or use Google's official account deletion guide). This removes all data Google holds about you, including Gmail, Drive, Photos, and all history. This is permanent and cannot be undone. Before doing this, download your data first using Google Takeout at takeout.google.com.
When you Google your name and find your home address, phone number, and relatives listed on people-search sites, the instinct is to blame Google. But Google is not the source of this information — it is merely the index. The data lives on broker sites like Spokeo, WhitePages, BeenVerified, and thousands of others. Google's search engine simply finds and displays what these sites publish.
Removing your information from Google Search requires addressing it at two levels: the source site and the search index.
The permanent solution is to get your data removed from the data broker site that is publishing it. Once the source page no longer contains your information, Google's next crawl will update the search results automatically. This typically takes a few days to a few weeks.
This means contacting each data broker individually — Spokeo, WhitePages, BeenVerified, TruePeopleSearch, Radaris, and potentially hundreds of others. Each site has its own opt-out process, and many deliberately make the process difficult with CAPTCHAs, phone verification, physical mail requirements, and multi-step forms.
Google offers a personal information removal tool that can accelerate the process of removing certain types of personal information from search results. This tool is available at Google's Results About You page.
Google will consider removing search results that contain your personal contact information (phone number, email, physical address), confidential government identification numbers, bank account or credit card numbers, handwritten signatures, or images of identity documents.
However, Google's removal tool has important limitations. It removes the search result, not the underlying data. The information still exists on the source site. It does not guarantee removal — Google reviews each request and may decline. It does not cover information that is already publicly available through government records. And it only affects Google's search index — your information may still appear on Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and other search engines.
Removing your data from Google Search is treating the symptom. The disease is the 2,415 data broker sites that collect, publish, and sell your personal information. Google indexes what they publish. If you remove yourself from Google but leave your data on the broker sites, it will reappear in search results the next time Google crawls those sites. And your data remains available to anyone who searches for you directly on those broker sites rather than through Google.
The comprehensive approach is to send deletion demands to every data broker that holds your information. When the source data is destroyed, the search results disappear permanently.
This is the difference between sweeping water off the floor and turning off the faucet. Google removal requests sweep the floor. Data broker deletion demands turn off the faucet.
Google itself operates as one of the world's largest data brokers. Through its advertising network (Google Ads, DoubleClick, AdSense), Google collects and sells access to detailed profiles of billions of users. Your browsing history, search queries, location data, email content, and YouTube viewing habits are all used to build advertising profiles that Google sells access to.
However, Google is not a traditional data broker in the regulatory sense. Google does not sell your raw data to third parties — it sells targeted advertising based on your data. The distinction matters legally because some data broker regulations do not apply to advertising platforms that retain custody of the data rather than selling it outright.
Regardless of the legal classification, the practical step is the same: minimize what Google collects about you by turning off activity controls, using private browsing, and considering alternative services for email (ProtonMail), search (DuckDuckGo), and mapping (Apple Maps or OpenStreetMap).
We send legal CCPA deletion demands to 2,415 data brokers — the sites that publish your information for Google to index. When the source data is deleted, the search results disappear permanently. $9.95/month.
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