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Comment by fibers | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this good? What's the downside?

Looks like perhaps a loophole to deindex any page from google that allows comments. Just sneak in some doxxing looking info, like a bank account number and name like "John Doe 99874848383".

Who needs such a “loophole”? It’s already very common to take down pages with fake DMCAs, fake legal process and fake court orders.

Anyone wanting to deploy dirty tricks to remove things from Google can do so very easily already

It has the advantage of being a little more stealthy than taking those kind of actions against the page itself.

This is really good, imho. The downside is that the information is of course all still out there for a sufficiently motivated person to find.

The possible downside is that it could allow scammers/fraudsters to get their details removed.

> What's the downside?

I did reconnect with someone I lost track of a long time ago via google-stalking, found their email address. I'm pretty sure they agree that it was nice to reconnect, we talk regularly again.

(Neither of us are FB users, so no, it doesn't substitute.)

For this to be a downside, you have to believe that the person expressly wants to remove their email address from your view, but nevertheless wants to reconnect with you. That's possible, but I don't think a sane thing to build around.

It's a downside, not a "build around".

Now Google knows exactly who and where you are.

Krebs’s doxing posts will get removed from Google?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com