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Comment by KennyBlanken | Hacker News Reader

The headline is extremely misleading. They will only remove the information if you are being targeted by a doxxing campaign, and they make it incredibly onerous to remove the information - you have to provide screenshots, the URLs that generate the search results, and then, bizarrely, you must also separately provide the search terms.

The whole thing feels like a /r/maliciouscompliance post.

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I work for Google Search. We're working to clear this up. Threat is not required to remove the listed PII. I'll repeat what I shared in another comment here:

There is NO requirement of threat to remove anything listed as personally identifiable information on this page (such as personal contact info, medical records, login credentials, etc): https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9673730

Beyond those things listed, in some cases someone who is being threatened might feel there's additional information that someone might feel is somehow personally identifying. This is where the doxxing/threat option can be used, for something not on the list where no threat is required.

Appreciate this is confusing to some; we'll be looking at how to clarify that.

Indeed it's complex to do the submission but I understand why Google needs some of the details to process with fidelity and consideration. Sadly, simple privacy is now complex to achieve. We have to start unraveling 25 years of unfettered data collection somewhere. Google here is no worse than the data brokers red tape processes and corporations hiding behind consent managers with ID verification etc.

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