Comment by dannysullivan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dannysullivan | Hacker News Reader

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I work from Google Search. Hope this helps clarify...

There's a lot of personal info we'll remove such as images of minors, involuntary fake pornography and other issues as outlined here: https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/3111061

Our announcement this week was about an expansion of removing personally identifying information -- PII -- (such as email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, etc),. This is the page that explains in more detail and where people should begin the removal process: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9673730

The removal process will lead you to a troubleshooter. That's designed to help people more quickly get things resolved. For example, if a web page no longer exists on the web, or the site owner removed info, there are faster options you can use rather than going down the formal removal request option.

But let's say you want something removed that has PII from a page that's live on the web and where you for whatever reason don't want to contact the site owner. The troubleshooter from that page I mentioned will lead you here: https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/9685456#...

Say No to contacting the site owner, select Personal Info from the next option, pick the type of info and you'll get to the form (such as here if it involves contact info): https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/9685456#...

That's where you enter the info. Appreciate the feedback that we should look at how to improve this more -- that said, the troubleshooter itself isn't new, and people have used it to successfully remove information beyond our recent expansion. But we'll see how to make it better.

But you do get that that’s not particularly user friendly right?

Like why not offer tools to make it easy to submit “here’s my phone number - delist it” or “here’s my name and all addresses I’ve lived - delist”and then you use Google’s awesome search and AI capabilities to figure that out. Then facilitate disputes between site owners and individuals. But forcing me to scan the internet looking for things that other malicious crawlers are finding. That’s not user friendly I think (in addition that finding this needs someone on the team to explain it on HN, one of the most technical sites on the world).

It’s like the Douglas Adam’s joke from Hitchhikers (going from memory so I’m sure I’m butchering it): “but we published the plans to destroy the Earth in the center of the next galaxy in the 100th underground floor of the administrative building in the filing cabinet in the locked room guarded by man eating lions.”

Because that's not Google's business. At least this is a step in the right direction. That IS the business of privacy removal services like DeleteMe which i am a cofounder of. Like in many things in life the advice "follow the $" can be helpful here ;)

What's follow the money mean here? Like Google won't do work cause there is too much cost? This usage of the phrase don't match my understanding (which is the Lester Fremon (The Wire) usage) - in that it leads to corruption.

i think to parent comment it means "use my service, if google makes one i cant compete"

I think the notion they're trying to convey is Google doesn't have much motivation to make this feature good / humane as it has little immediate impact to their bottom line, compared to a company whose revenue derives directly from how well said feature performs.

But what if Googles model is to make personal data useless the root cause businesses and therefore kill off your business.

To kill off the root cause, Google could feed peoples privacy data into the SSO ranking. Websites with a lot of privacy data get a lower SSO. This cripples the business and with it, your business.

Just a hypothetical, I wish all the best for DeleteMe. I'm checking out optery.com right now and will check DeleteMe next.

"Don't be evil" I think may still be true and may actionably translate to "Don't sell user data _directly_"

People who end comments/messages with ";)" or the like always seem so condescending.

Because they want to make it as difficult as possible on purpose.

The full quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

> “But the plans were on display…”

> “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”

> “That’s the display department.”

> “With a flashlight.”

> “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”

> “So had the stairs.”

> “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”

> “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

Your quote is about the local department's plans to demolish Arthur Dent's house.

The quote about the destruction of Earth is:

>‘There’s no point acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now.’

> ‘What do you mean you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? For heaven’s sake mankind, it’s only four light years away you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs that’s your own lookout.

> ‘I don’t know’ said the voice on the PA, ‘apathetic bloody planet, I’ve no sympathy at all.’

To be fair, they correctly picked out the quote that is actually relevant and also the one that their parent comment had been thinking of.

Actually clearly with time I’d merged the two.

If you have an AI, it'll likely have false positives. Then website owners might end up wondering why a lot of their pages aren't showing up in the results.

Disclosure, I work at Google, but not on anything related to this, so I'm just speculating.

Plus what about people trying to remove the details of someone else. It's not something you want automated.

Every x days I need to revalidate my phone number for Google voice. I would think Google has the mechanisms to validate phone number. In fact they also have the ability to validate addresses which they use for maps business listings.

Which is why I said make the process more like DMCA where the page owner can contest.

DMCA is a pretty bad thing to model after if you want to prevent abuse.

I searched for a number that's similar to mine (not my own).

I found google hits listing it as a german number, italian number, swedish number and more. Clearly not all of these are "my number" even if it's the same number. It's not reasonable that those pages are all delisted, is it?

Thanks for the help! What can Google do about property search records on the internet? I understand this is technically "public" information, but having my full address searchable on the internet via just my name is kind of scary. Can those sites be removed entirely from the index? (i.e. realtyhop, blockshopper, clustrmaps, etc)

Our new policy allows you the ability to remove these types of listings for your name, if they are not official government sites.

Ah good 'ole customer diversion, intentionally making it as difficult as possible for the customer to do what they want to do by making them jump through hoops on the pretence that you know better. Saves google money as it takes humans out the loop. Lovely dark pattern.

Very much appreciate the quick response and explanation!

I found that a usability expert can come handy.

Hi, a bit of late feedback: at this point, I would expect to be able to prevent at least the contact information pertaining to my own Google account from being searchable. My phone number is already known and verified to be mine by Google, it should be trivial for me (prominently displayed in account privacy settings) to delist this pre-verified information from search.

For the form field "List the query terms", shouldn't it be a multi-line field?

The instruction is: "Please enter one query term per line (max 10000 lines)"

Thank you for your clarification. A small portal under an URL, say removal.google.com or google.com/removal featuring this content and links there - that would be a great start.

Cool thanks for the details!

How do you protect someone filing fake requests to hide another person or personal business from being findable, to damage them? How do you prevent abuse?

The policy doesn't allow for removal of business info but rather personal info. And there is a review process. If someone tried to, I suppose, remove a page for someone's name who ran their own business and submitted the business URL, the review process would ideally catch that in multiple ways, request more information and so on. That's why we do use a review process.

It's almost like Google doesn't want anyone to use this 'feature'... Great company.

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