How to request removal of your contact info from Google search results | Hacker News Reader

How to request removal of your contact info from Google search results

blog.google

218 pointsadamdegas64 comments

An easier all be it less ethical way to remove your info is just file a dmca takedown request with google. They are required to and will automatically take down the reported page. There’s no verification and just your assertion that you own the copyright is enough to nuke any page from a search listing.

They do ask the other side though no? Otherwise I can spider the competitor and their clients and just report all pages?

They don’t ask, they tell. The other side is expected to cease and desist, or file a ”counter DMCA” under perjury and expect to get sued by whomever filed the DMCA.

>There’s no verification and just your assertion that you own the copyright is enough to nuke any page from a search listing.

This is by design, and Google is complicit in that design

DMCA was written before Google existed, so it's impossible for Google to have been complicit in its design.

The law might have been written before google, but its interpretation and practical applications are decided by the courts which google has definitely been party to.

I think it's fair to say that google has "designed" how the law has been interpreted and enforced.

Not just completely unethical, but also illegal even if unlikely to be prosecuted.

There isn't a "remove result" button. At the bottom there is a "Privacy settings", "How Search works" and "Cached" button, while the screenshot shows "Remove result" and "How Search works".

Having unsuccessfully gone through 2 different procedures to try to remove that page from Google search result, I have little faith that it will work now.

Same for me. Presumably there's some super narrow set of conditions when this works and that isn't applying for us but did let them put our a blog post at that point back in May.

Perhaps it's another facet of the problem Google had not knowing how many G Suite legacy edition users they had. Maybe they have so many combinations of experiments/features running on people's search result pages that they cannot appreciate that many people won't get this?

I didn't know about this feature (and it doesn't show up for me, anyway) so I tried to remove some pages with contact information via GDPR, which they declined.

I'm on a laptop (using Firefox). I see a remove result option after I click the dots next to the respective search result. I experimented and I can see it regardless if I am logged into my Google account or not.

I just searched for the term "foo" and clicked on the second or third result.

In New Zealand you are required to attach your name and address to formal submissions responding to proposed public policy changes. A while ago there was a proposal regarding The largest Harbor Bridge in the country. A lot of people attach their name to a submission supporting adding a cycling lane to the bridge , And all these peoples names and the address they used are just there online attached to their political opinion. I don’t know if people would expect their address to be public so they probably use their home address. It would be good if there were a way to report documents containing a lot of private information and suggest that Google doesn’t index them.

Was that information public anyway? How can you look up that data without google?

It was probably public as part of the report on the submissions process, but fairly obscure if you weren’t looking for that information exactly. I found it be googling a family members name. Google provides the way to look it up using someone’s name as the starting point.

This is also true of the US at the federal level - comments on regulations.gov for example.

That's essentially what a phonebook is/was.

You had a phonebook that listed political preferences?

Well, no, but I assumed the meat would be in the name/address, not whether someone thinks yea/nay on a bridge accessory - especially because the former can be easily extracted en masse, whereas the latter would need to be individually analyzed and coded before it could be useful - which is generally a turn off to spammers/scammers who are playing a numbers game.

And, in many (US) states, you can find out someone's affiliated party if any with just their name and address.

Shouldn’t there be one place I can ask for them to remove all references to me containing my phone number or address? It seems silly to have to do this hundreds of times even if it does work.

This is a psyop to make regulators and low-information users think it'll achieve anything.

Just like credit reports, this also inverts the responsibility - you are responsible to get your information delisted as opposed to giving your explicit OK for it to be listed or appear in a search engine. It never ceases to amaze me, how if a bank lends to someone who pretends to be me, why is that my problem and why should my good name and reputation be soiled. Putting that onus on the defrauded consumer is really overlooking the fact that the bank or lender didn't do enough due diligence.

Under some circumstances, e.g. buying a house, your address is probably a matter of public record--at least in the US. Certainly legal judgements and so forth are. Well beyond Google, deep web sites also store a ton of information on you. At least these are mostly not free these days but for $50 or so and a modicum of information about you, especially if have an unusual name, I can probably dig up a ton of information about age, where you've lived, and so forth.

What happens if you use this new Google tool on a, say, a legal judgement or property record or so forth? Do you think it refuses to remove it from search results if the software thinks it's a matter of public record? I doubt it, but that is an interesting point... can I remove legal judgements and so forth from google search results this way already?

I would expect it to suppress the result for this particular search term, but not from ever showing up in the results?

Is that how the tool announced in OP works in general? I had assumed it removed it from all Google search results; going back and looking at the OP... I'm not really sure. (Google not being transparent about what they're doing? Shocking!)

Hmm, I think I was wrong. The post says "we will evaluate all content on the web page to ensure that we're not limiting the availability of other information that is broadly useful, for instance in news articles" which does make it sound like they would be removing the page from all search results?

If something is part of a public record, it doesn't mean the government needs to let Google index it. In fact, it doesn't even need to be on the internet - they could require you to physically go to city hall to request the record and it would still be a public record.

If you know my very unique last name, and the county I live in, my county will just tell you exactly where I live, and other things like how much I paid for my house. It doesn't need to be that way.

This could also be a way to identify Stalking As A Service sites.

If a site gets lots of individual people going to the trouble to Google-remove themselves from it, maybe that's reason to consider delisting the site.

From the ones I've seen, the main offenders are easy to tell apart, no additional signals are needed. That being said, I would use this on w3schools just to get it out of my search results.

Scrubbing on Search is a good first step towards reclaiming some modicum of privacy, but what about Bing, DDG, Ecosia, Metager, Swisscows, Yandex, Baidu, Kagi, You, Brave, etc?

Guess you’re still just shit out of luck if someone really wants to find you, and knows how.

Also, scrub as much as you want, but Google will still store your info forever and it will be monetized.

Sounds like that would be open to abuse of from black hat seo types.

I think it would be better to be more aggressive and take preemptive hostile action, rather than waiting for it to appear and desperately trying to scrub it afterwards. There should be a tool to publish false personal details in a way that is indistinguishable from real ones.

So if I want to punish someone I can publish their personal details attached to something embarrassing?

Half of the search engines you mentioned use the Google index. Most of the other half uses the bing index.

Well, there are services that do that for you for about the cost of a Netflix sub.

I used a YC company https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/optery

There might be better ones, but I haven't looked.

I have an extremely common first name and last name combo. While it does help a lot, even then it has limits. If they have any detail like an address, email, or phone number; more info was available about me online than I was comfortable to share.

So, the plan is that people click each result about them, one at a time, then Google manually reviews each request?

This is begging to be automated on the consumer side.

I wonder what they will do once someone writes a tool to submit 10,000 of these in, say, 60 seconds. (Not that this would be enough to deal with all the sockpuppet domains in that industry anyway...)

Yeah, doesn't work. I googled my name, found a website with all my info posted (without my permission), filled all the details it was repeating and when I click submit request I get this

> Something went wrong and your request wasn't submitted. Check your internet connection and try again.

I imagine more than a few people have literal featured snippets based on social profile's they've unknowingly made wonderful for google's SEO, which (in the case that they don't want the attention), this would be great.

disclaimer (co-founder) but we do this as a service AND use Google's new tools and others to both request removals at the source + in the search indices. it's complex, imperfect, and evolving dynamically... but can be done. https://joindeleteme.com/

Somewhat relevant, but my firm was getting spammed by a provider called Surf Shark. Their emails were requesting removal of their "customers" data from our systems/DBs. We were getting hundreds of emails a day requesting removal. So we built this: https://SimpleOptOutCompliance.com/ with the aim of offering a low cost GDPR / CCPA compliance tool.

is it really spam if you have data on someone that can be deleted?

Many people in the privacy space do not consider these requests to be legitimate because of the power of attorney granted to them is a moot. Furthermore, we are sent requests whether or not we have data on these subjects. So in both regards we are being "spammed"

From your Privacy Policy:

""" Tracking and Performance Cookies

Type: Persistent Cookies

Administered by: Third-Parties

Purpose: These Cookies are used to track information about traffic to the Website and how users use the Website. The information gathered via these Cookies may directly or indirectly identify you as an individual visitor. This is because the information collected is typically linked to a pseudonymous identifier associated with the device you use to access the Website. We may also use these Cookies to test new pages, features or new functionality of the Website to see how our users react to them.

...

The Company may use Personal Data for the following purposes:

For other purposes: We may use Your information for other purposes, such as data analysis, identifying usage trends, determining the effectiveness of our promotional campaigns and to evaluate and improve our Service, products, services, marketing and your experience.

...

We may share Your personal information in the following situations:

With business partners: We may share Your information with Our business partners to offer You certain products, services or promotions. """

How hard is it to not track people? Will I be tracked even though I got no consent popup and therefore didn't provide it? (I block those on principle). Why even build something so pretentious about GDPR compliance yet you do the dirty things everyone else does?

Thanks for letting me know, this was a boiler plate policy that we edited the bones of. I don't know how that crept in. We have no intention of selling this data or any other data, so I have amended the policy. Thank you.

Come on.

Seriously, its a paid for subscription service for small businesses...no need or desire to sell.

So? What a horrific first impression.

“Remove my details” that asks that I sign-in to Google. Privacy-washing.

Presumably Google also has to know your contact info in order to know you are authorized to request removal of search results containing it...

Doesn't mean they need to require a google account to provide that info though; It definitely costs more to maintain a good privacy portal, which is probably why the companies I've seen do it either list an email address in their privacy policy and handle it ad-hoc, or they use one of the P/S-aaS providers that handle the portal ( and the concerns with owning the data for the types validating documentation people provide )

> It definitely costs more to maintain a good privacy portal

It costs them more to do fraud and abuse prevention than to run a customer support system that happens to hook into google3 (because that's what it is - if you click 'remove result' it just puts it in a queue for review. The privacy portal at myactivity.google.com/results-about-you is just a way to check on the status of your removals).

It took 20+ years, privacy legislation in multiple countries and untold horror stories for them to come up with this basic solution? What was the proverbial straw?

> if you find a result that shows your personal contact info

Why not just proactively being able to remove your personal info. Why do I have to find a search result first?

It's pretty much impossible to automate satisfactorily, or Google would almost certainly have done it, since they as a company seem to hate human interaction.

There are a lot of ways to format a number, and there are a lot of addresses that aren't all that unique (and sometimes are mixed, residential and commercial). Is that nine-digit number an SSN, EIN, (I)TIN, a FedEx package number, or just a random product ID on a shopping website? Oh, there's a name there? Who's it for? Oh, Barbazoo? The Barbazoo from Kalamazoo, or the Australian town of Cockatoo? Or, further still, the Barbazoo from Timbuktu? It doesn't say? That just won't do! Is there an address? No. Is there a number? Maybe, you say? Well that just isn't okay. And are you sure it isn't the famous Barbazoo of Waterloo? Nor the local politician in Taungoo, Barbazoo? Oh my, and you're telling me that Barbazoo is a word in a dialect of Telugu? It's enough to make you rue the lack of a unique name system. It's certainly a lot to chew, and a difficult problem, too.

We should move from opt-out model to opt-in with automatics expiration.

Does this require a Google login? Give information to remove your information?

An authentication system is different from public information.

This is a terrible step. This isn't your private data, it is information about you.

Phone books were a great step towards a high-trust society. This is a great leap backwards, brought to you by the same personalities that were responsible for previous great leaps.

You could delist yourself from the phone book.

It was always possible to have a private unlisted number, though it typically cost a buck or two extra a month. My family and myself always chose that option, we didn’t want random people calling us.

And it's now sort of irrelevant with the increasing demise of landlines. And there's a ton of information that's public as a matter of public policy.

Most people don't want other people to be able to have that information about them unless they give it to them. I've been doxxed and it's not fun having that kind of information out there. There aren't many innocuous reasons people would be looking that up. Doxxing wouldn't even be a thing if it were harmless.

"right from the Google app" i would argue this is still unacceptable; we should not need to login to it nor prove our identities to remove our PII from the search results. It should be hidden by default and shared only when i explicitly share it, with no strings attached.

For everyone that isn't on HN, a captcha is higher friction than the google app or being logged into google on their mobile browser.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com