Google Now Allowing Minors to Request Photos of Themselves Be Removed - KOAT News - November 1, 2021

Google is Now Allowing Minors to Request Photos of Themselves Be Removed

This week on New Mexico’s ABC affiliate KOAT News Morning Segment our director Lisa Honold talked about how minors can now request photos of themselves be removed from Google. Use this form to make the request. ***Note: There is a different reporting process for child sexual abuse photos. Go here for more information.

You can learn more about how this works here. This reporting process is useful for embarrassing photos, pictures that you don’t want future employers or higher education institutions to see, images that may convey bad judgment…

From Google’s blog: "We know that kids and teens have to navigate some unique challenges online, especially when a picture of them is unexpectedly available on the internet," the company said in the blog post. "We believe this change will help give young people more control over their digital footprint and where their images can be found on Search."

In Digital Citizenship classes, kids are learning about their “digital footprints”. Your digital footprint is the information that can be found about you, and kids are advised to keep their footprint small. Removing photos from a search engine like Google gives youth the ability to do this.

While this ability to remove photos from Google is a great start, remember, Google is just a search engine pulling its images from sources like apps and websites. You will also need to request that the original website removes the image.