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 You could then request Google remove its own indexed result once the webmaster acts through an “outdated information” removal request.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.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Google Can Now Remove Your Identifying Search Results, If They’re the Right Kind