Google Can Now Remove Your Identifying Search Results, If They're the Right Kind (arstechnica.com) 14
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google has been pushing out a tool for removing personally identifiable information -- or doxxing content -- from its search results. It's a notable step for a firm that has long resisted individual moderation of search content, outside of broadly harmful or copyright-violating material. But whether it works for you or not depends on many factors. As with almost all Google features and products, you may not immediately have access to Google's new removal process. If you do, though, you should be able to click the three dots next to a web search result (while signed in), or in a Google mobile app, to pull up "About this result." Among the options you can click at the bottom of a pop-up are "Remove result." Take note, though, that this button is much more intent than immediate action -- Google suggests a response time of "a few days."
Google's blog post about this tool, updated in late September, notes that "Starting early next year," you can request regular alerts for when your personal identifying information (PII) appears in new search results, allowing for quicker reporting and potential removal. I took a trial run through the process by searching my name and a relatively recent address on Google, then reporting it. The result I reported was from a private company that, while putting on the appearance of only posting public or Freedom of Information Act-obtained records, places those records next to links that send you to the site's true owner, initiating a "background check" or other tracking services for a fee.
The first caveat Google carves out in its blog post is whether the page your information appears on also contains "other information that is broadly useful, for instance in news articles." So if your information is appearing because a newspaper or other publication regularly publishes, for example, lists of real estate transactions, Google isn't likely to take that page down. Google then notes that removing your info from a Google search "doesn't remove it from the web," so they suggest a help page they've compiled for contacting a site webmaster about removal. In other words, if Google can see a page with your information on it, so can Bing, DuckDuckGo, and other web-indexing search sites, so removing the original page is important. You could then request Google remove its own indexed result once the webmaster acts through an "outdated information" removal request. [...] Google notes that it generally aims to preserve search results if "the content is determined to be of public interest." This includes "Content on or from government and other official sources," and newsworthy and professionally relevant content. There's a different case for doxxing, notes Ars Technica's Kevin Purdy. "If there is an 'explicit or implicit threat,' or 'calls to action for others to harm or harass,' that can make the removal easier under Google's doxxing policy, initiated in May."
Google's blog post about this tool, updated in late September, notes that "Starting early next year," you can request regular alerts for when your personal identifying information (PII) appears in new search results, allowing for quicker reporting and potential removal. I took a trial run through the process by searching my name and a relatively recent address on Google, then reporting it. The result I reported was from a private company that, while putting on the appearance of only posting public or Freedom of Information Act-obtained records, places those records next to links that send you to the site's true owner, initiating a "background check" or other tracking services for a fee.
The first caveat Google carves out in its blog post is whether the page your information appears on also contains "other information that is broadly useful, for instance in news articles." So if your information is appearing because a newspaper or other publication regularly publishes, for example, lists of real estate transactions, Google isn't likely to take that page down. Google then notes that removing your info from a Google search "doesn't remove it from the web," so they suggest a help page they've compiled for contacting a site webmaster about removal. In other words, if Google can see a page with your information on it, so can Bing, DuckDuckGo, and other web-indexing search sites, so removing the original page is important. You could then request Google remove its own indexed result once the webmaster acts through an "outdated information" removal request. [...] Google notes that it generally aims to preserve search results if "the content is determined to be of public interest." This includes "Content on or from government and other official sources," and newsworthy and professionally relevant content. There's a different case for doxxing, notes Ars Technica's Kevin Purdy. "If there is an 'explicit or implicit threat,' or 'calls to action for others to harm or harass,' that can make the removal easier under Google's doxxing policy, initiated in May."
What a joke (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been playing with this this week. Every submission against a clustmaps.com hit was denied.
The reason each time was:
"Webpage doesn’t exist in Search
We checked the webpage you requested to remove from search results, but we couldn’t find the page in the Google Search index. This means it doesn’t show up in search results, so we can’t remove it."
Which is nonsense, I can load the URLs fine. I literally picked them out of a google search result. Even better, using Google's search results and submitting it for removal, the links come over into the request as AMP pages.
Of course, there's no appeals, no push back, you just try to submit the result again and get the same results.
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so many words .... and no url.
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https://support.google.com/web... [google.com]
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clustmaps.com doesn't work for me, returns a 404. But that's not the issue here.
Google will only remove results for your name that go to that site. If you enter your name into Google and a link to that site comes up, you can have it removed. What they are telling you is that if you enter your name, their search engine doesn't offer links to clustmaps.com, so there is nothing to remove.
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In other words... (Score:2)
We want to know all the PII we can about you and tie it to your Google account, especially if you've never fully given it to us before. You know, for your safety.
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No one who cares about Google having their PII signs into a Google account for a mere web search.
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No one who cares about Google having their PII signs into a Google account for a mere web search.
No, but Chrome is the dominant web browser, and Chrome has a tendency to keep Google Account logins active unless a user explicitly chooses to sign out. More to the point, if a person is asking to hide a Google search result, especially if Google says 'no' and they dispute it, Google has a pretty solid idea that the result is about them personally, and whatever PII is on that result gets tied to the Google account...not using a means that's obvious to the end user of course, but if a person named Steve Sixp
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Again, no one who cares about Google having their PII uses Chrome.
We weirdos who care about this stuff use Firefox with privacy extensions, disable cookies, don't sign in to a Google account, etc.
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Software keeps you logged in until you log out, the horror!
You are almost certainly wrong about them scraping your PII from random websites though. For a start it would be illegal in Europe due to GDPR. But even in the US it would be a bad idea, because there would be legal liability if they used information that had been stolen or which was wrong in a way that damaged your reputation.
And why bother taking the risk, when people willingly give them that kind of data anyway?
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But even in the US it would be a bad idea, because there would be legal liability if they used information that had been stolen or which was wrong in a way that damaged your reputation.
I understand what you're getting at, and agree that the number of people they'd categorize in this way is way smaller than the group of people who hand over that information voluntarily...but given how much culpability there was for Equifax, I'm hard pressed to believe that Google is worried about any sort of actual litigation against them. Where the math works out is unclear, but ultimately I'm extremely hard pressed to credit this to Google's sense of altruism. If it was altruism, it wouldn't require an a
Information wants to be free (Score:2)
Of course. It helps them earn money by targeting the advertising better — Captain Obvious confirms.
I don't think, they are hiding the profit-motive...
No, I don't like it either — but that the price we pay for using Google's "free" search engine.
Am I alone? (Score:2)
I like that people can look up information on me. Its like 'whoa its that big?'