Search Suppression

As part of our commitment to consistently optimize your privacy and cybersecurity protections, BlackCloak is releasing a new feature for all members called Search Suppression. This will address concerns regarding personally identifiable information that remains searchable online and is pending removal through standard data broker removal processes.. 

"Search Suppression adds an additional layer of privacy protection that complements our data broker removal (DBR) service. With DBR, we consistently monitor data broker websites for removal of your leaked personal information. Search Suppression will proactively find and obscure search results–on popular search engines such as Google–containing members' personally identifiable information. These search results will be found using names, phone numbers, and various spellings of addresses. A scan for new results is performed every 30 days. Successfully suppressed URLs will not appear in search results, which will make it harder for threat actors to find our members’ personal information and help make our members more secure and private.

Search Suppression is not the same as data removal, as your search results will be nominally hidden but not outright removed from the internet. Many pieces of information are not able to be removed outright due to legality or other fair use principles. Search Suppression hides websites from search results when the website contains the member’s name with their address or phone number. URLs may still be found using other searches and/or terms. Search Suppression can not hide news media or defamation, images, publicly-available records, or member-created content (such as social media, blogs, etc).

The following information will appear in your BlackCloak application: 

Most recent scan

• Total scans performed 

• Number of suppression requests submitted 

• Total number of results found 

• Successful suppressions

As a reminder, scans consist of one or more online searches and are done every 30 days by default. If you have questions about your Search Suppression results, please reach out to our Concierge Team.