29 ms·

Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

717 points by danso 5y ago

danso 5y ago
Couldn't fit the whole tweet, so just to be clear, she's talking about manual, non-legal requests: > One of the surprising things about working on the slander series is how few people in the field, even experts, know that Google voluntarily removes some search results. (No court order needed!) You have to visit this generic url: https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/3111061?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/3111061?... Down the thread, she adds this: > Because so few people know about it, "reputation managers" are charging people like $500 a pop to "remove damaging information from Google results." And ALL THEY DO is fill out that form for free. Someone tried to hawk this service to my husband after he came under attack. I didn't know about this service URL, and had just assumed "reputation managers", if they did anything at all, were limited to SEO spamming. edit: Searched HN for mention of this link and found exactly 5 results, 3 of which look unique, and the earliest in Dec. 23, 2015: https://imgur.com/EEUJn9M https://imgur.com/EEUJn9M
- tyingq 5y ago
  They are fairly narrow categories though, and don't handle things like mugshot sites, even if it's something you were arrested...but not convicted for. Still useful to know for sure.
  - joshuamorton 5y ago
    Mugshot sites might be covered by https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9172218 https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9172218, but it depends. [disclosure: I'm a googler, but no clue about this service]
    - tyingq 5y ago
      I'm pretty sure the mugshot sites have adjusted their practices where it's much harder to prove what's really going on. Straight up blackmail payment pages are gone.
      - Rasta1s 5y ago
        Aren't mugshots public records?
        jrockway 5y ago
        It's the great "public" vs. "publicized" debate.
        tyingq 5y ago
        Sort of. Some police departments publish them, some don't. Some publish them only day of, then remove them. Some only show them if you do the right kind of search (last/first/ maybe + birth). The predatory mugshot sites scrape these variations and publish them in a "forever" way, with lots of SEO tricks. Then basically shake you down for payment to remove them.
        mike_d 5y ago
        Technically yes, but they are removed when a person is found not guilty or released without being charged thus protecting the innocent and falsely accused. The mugshot sites capitalize on this by scraping the government websites and archiving them forever - until you pay a removal fee. Mugshots.com was doing exactly this until they got hit with extortion charges: https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-mugshot-website-owners-extortion-20180518-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-mugshot-websi...
        Rasta1s 5y ago
        " Technically yes, but they are removed when a person is found not guilty or released without being charged thus protecting the innocent and falsely accused. The mugshot sites capitalize on this by scraping the government websites and archiving them forever - until you pay a removal fee." I don't believe anyone has an obligation to remove if someone found not guilty. The arrest happened, that's a fact. The information is public was made public by the government, that's also a fact. From my understanding once something is made public you can't put it back in the bag. The government may do so on their own databases (Ie. Expungement, removal from government databases) but that doesn't apply to the public and especially not to publications who have first amendment right to publish public records. I looked up the case you mentioned, it's still pending and the arguments made by the government are questionable https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180523/10224639892/california-prosecutors-arrest-website-owners-allowing-money-to-influence-which-public-records-they-host.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180523/10224639892/calif...
- judge2020 5y ago
  This might also include what is required to comply with GDPR’s right to be forgotten, if that’s still a thing.
  - vitus 5y ago
    That's a different form! https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/legal-removal-request?complaint_type=rtbf https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/legal-removal-reques...
- majormajor 5y ago
  > Because so few people know about it, "reputation managers" are charging people like $500 a pop to "remove damaging information from Google results." And ALL THEY DO is fill out that form for free. Someone tried to hawk this service to my husband after he came under attack. While that sounds like a high price, and you usually don't want to just hire the first person you see advertise a service, the concept of specialization there, and some people just not wanting to devote the time to becoming experts everywhere, seems perfectly fine and normal. People often pay electricians even for tasks that are just "flip a switch and turn some screws," after all.
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - sombremesa 5y ago
    Electricity can kill you. Doesn't seem like a good comparison.
    - amelius 5y ago
      Ending up in a Google search result can too, I suppose, in some indirect way.
      - sombremesa 5y ago
        Help me with how this is relevant. Is the person you hired to scrub your Google result risking getting doxxed?
        sumedh 5y ago
        I assume the point was that anything negative about you ends up on Google it can lead to mental issues and in a worst case scenario you might take your life so its better you hire a professional to scrub it for you.
        amelius 5y ago
- gist 5y ago
  > are charging people like $500 a pop to "remove damaging information from Google results." And ALL THEY DO is fill out that form for free. Someone tried to hawk this service to my husband after he came under attack. 'ALL THEY DO' is what anyone does in a similar way. You are paying for what they know that you don't know how to do. There is nothing wrong or deceptive about making money in this way. (use of 'all they do' seems to imply this). Plenty of people are busy and willing to pay for things to have someone else handle the details. Google could easily publicize this but they choose not to. Here is the thing. Someone charging $500 (or any amount) has already filtered people that feel they have a real need from everyone attempting to do similar. Now you could argue the fee should be less but the friction caused by that higher fee (for those who can afford it) is worth it. And those that can't can do research and effort (like with anything) to find a way to achieve the same. People often expect everything to be free and nobody to make money off of knowledge. By the way if reputation managers are charging $500 nothing to prevent someone from doing the same for less and changing the market price. Also I'd image the rep managers possibly massage some things to get the job done something many people wouldn't know or want to do.
  - crispyambulance 5y ago
    > There is nothing wrong or deceptive about making money in this way. Absolutely incorrect. It's more complicated and insidious than your reductive argument suggests. These reputation "management" companies are also the ones who scrape public records on a massive scale and DELIBERATELY place this data really high up in search rankings. So, casual searches for someone's name often end up returning vague negative results like "xxx has a criminal record, find out more!". They ALSO spam people at internet scale and warn them about their "reputation" and how they can "fix" it. In other words, they provide the "cure" for the "injury" which they've caused. One of the worst and biggest of these piece of sh*t companies is mylife.com. They do the web-scraping and the SEO to get their results up high, AND ALSO charge money to "clean up" reputations. It happens to be legal in the USA because we're in a downward spiral of techno-feudalism, but it's a vile and dishonorable practice. The founder of mylife.com, Jeffery Tinsely, has become wealthy from these deceptive practices. He faces regular lawsuits (eg https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/info-2020/website-sued-mylife.html https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/info-2020/website-sue...). But somehow mylife.com continues to survive presumably by raking in the cash as well as VC investment (not sure if it was mylife or one of the other slimy companies run by Tinsely). FWIW, it is possible to remove your results from mylife.com. I did it. It requires a phone call and some firm persistence and patience. You call them on the phone and talk to someone at an Indian call center. Just say that you want to remove your name from mylife.com searches. It costs nothing but they WILL try to sell you their junk reputation management service with boiler-room-like intensity (worse than Verizon or Comcast), just decline for the 2 dozen times they ask. In the end it worked, I am no longer searchable on mylife.com and no mylife.com results show up on google under my name, but I get several emails a day from these MF's telling me that my reputation needs fixing and that "other people can see it". There's other companies like this. Mylife is particularly slimy but it's the biggest.
- tlogan 5y ago
  There is saying in Balkan countries: (my translation) “who knows knows, who does not know then it is 500 deutsche marks (dinars, etc.)”.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  And ALL THEY DO is fill out that form for free. Someone tried to hawk this service to my husband after he came under attack. It's like I tell my boss: "You don't pay me to push buttons. You pay me to know which buttons to push." (I think I stole it from the plumbing industry.)
- deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
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f38zf5vdt 5y ago
...what? I've known of this for at least a decade. Do people expect Google to be some free-for-all of unmoderated knowledge that can be used to defame and degrade others?
- danso 5y ago
  The author of the tweet also wrote a major NYT story about the topic earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25972121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25972121 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/30/technology/change-my-google-results.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/30/technology/change-my-goog... The story focuses on a software engineer who discovered that he was the slander target of someone who had been fired by his father 30 years ago. He found her identity and took her to court in 2018. But the libelous Google results didn't change. The NYT story even ends with this: > Yet even that hasn’t solved the problem. See for yourself: Do a Google search for “Guy Babcock.” A day after the NYT story, those results disappeared. Here's what they looked like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25973045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25973045 If a software engineer with the resources to find and take an anonymous libeler didn't know that Google could manually intervene and remove results that listed him as a pedophile, I'm assuming the vast majority of people are equally unaware.
  - forgotpwd16 5y ago
    >Until recently, Google would remove a website from your results only if it could cause financial damage, such as by exposing your Social Security number. Now Google will remove other harmful content, including revenge porn and private medical information. No wonder few people know it. On the "until recently" checking the Internet Archive[0], removal of any personal information was introduced to their page at end of 2019. Before then the only way was removing the information from the sites to which the result link pointed. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20191229062036/https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/3111061?hl=en https://web.archive.org/web/20191229062036/https://support.g...
- sneak 5y ago
  https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
kaliali 5y ago
I would've thought more people would realize this from last years US election. That's too bad.
toby- 5y ago
If people don't know about this, they haven't been paying attention. I find the idea that 'even experts' (haha) don't know about this rather hilarious.
- H8crilA 5y ago
  Toby, I haven't laughed so hard in a month.
throwaaskjdfh 5y ago
What does the Internet Archive/Wayback Machine do in similar circumstances?
- paulpauper 5y ago
  i am sure they will also remove stuff, but most ppl such as employers just do a google search
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  The Internet Archive may, in appropriate circumstances and at its discretion, remove certain content or disable access to content that appears to infringe the copyright or other intellectual property rights of others. https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360004716091-Wayback-Machine-General-Information https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360004716091-Wayb... In practice, IA will unpublish content on request to info@archive.org AFAIU
deertick1 5y ago
Yeah also if you compare results from google vs duckduckgo for controversial search terms like "I don't care about gender identity" Google will return only content that tells you why that opinion is wrong e.g. "why you should care about gender identity" Whereas duckduckgo will return stuff that actually matches your search. Google always errs on the side of left wing political platform. Its actually really egregious once you start testing it out. To the point that google actually completely buries really valuable information such as primary sources for controversial events, scientific studies etc and instead promotes shitty wapo articles ans the like that tell you how to think about the thing you are actually searching for.
- PhantomGremlin 5y ago
  Whereas duckduckgo will return stuff that actually matches your search. One upon a time Google was a really cool search engine. Entire books were written about how to use it wisely. E.g. Google Hacks 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/google-hacks/0596004478/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/google-hacks/0596004478... Now, it's impossible to properly qualify searches. Quotes don't mean shit. Appending "&tbs=li:1" to get verbatim results doesn't mean shit. Google just does whatever the hell it wants to. Which is probably great for the unwashed masses but really sucks for advanced users.
  - deertick1 5y ago
    Thank you. Could not agree more. I remember when you could finesse google for really odd or specific shit and its damn near impossible now.
- meisel 5y ago
  Can you provide more examples of this?
  - quacked 5y ago
    Look up "proof the moon landing was fake". I have an aerospace degree and don't think it was fake, but I still find it strange that Google won't return any of the conspiracy pages I enjoyed reading about a decade ago.
drdavid 5y ago
I wonder what checks and balances are in place. Can someone be a complete dirtbag and request that legitimate criticism be removed simply because they don't want folks to know they're a dirtbag? Can convicts request the results be removed? How about sex offenders? How about people convicted of domestic violence assaults or similar?
- k2xl 5y ago
  What I was wondering is how do they verify that the person is the one requesting themselves be removed? Can you technically have all results of someone that you don't like be removed? I could see that harming businesses if your name is often associated with your websites around your business.
- vmception 5y ago
  Its a check on the state. You can still go to individual services or your local municipality and ask.
- srj 5y ago
  The policy in question covers websites that post individual's information and charge a fee for removal. Disclaimer: Work at Google in this area.
dkokelley 5y ago
This is an example of a large central authority censoring information. How does the notion of a purely distributed, unregulated, uncensorable, blockchain-backed internet handle "revenge porn" or other genuinely harmful content? An argument I hear from the crypto community is that blockchain is good because it enables freedom of speech that can't be banned by governments or other central authorities. The crypto community needs to address the other side of that coin too. Are there circumstances when something should be banned, and how does that work on a blockchain?
- jedimastert 5y ago
  So, like, I get what you're saying, but I feel like you didn't actually look past the title of the post. This isn't governments censoring information or whatever, it's a form you can fill out to request removal of coerced personal information like revenge porn or doxxing.
  - dkokelley 5y ago
    I understand what the post is saying. I see this as an example of censorship (by Google in this case) being a GOOD thing. This caused me to wonder about how a decentralized platform would handle similar circumstances.
    - jedimastert 5y ago
      Whelp color me an ass for commenting about not reading past the headline while also completely missing the main crux of your argument! That's my b
- narrator 5y ago
  When talking about the blockchain and other voluntary systems, I tend to look at these things from a "what if there was no government that could just use physical coercion to implement its laws, how would you get people to voluntarily sign up for this?" perspective for these kinds of problems. You would get users to sign the social contract with some online entity and that entity would censor the blockchain for their ideological/legal jurisdiction. For example, you could sign the Christian fundamentalist social contract and have all blasphemy removed from your search results. In exchange, you would receive community support, access to their content, etc. If they found out you were browsing blasphemous material they would revoke the particular social contract you signed. Just spitballing here, but I wonder if the nofap guys could start something like this to block all nsfw content on whatever distributed blockchain thing was out there. Then they could offer some special forum as a benefit. You could use a DAO for governance conflicts, etc.
legitster 5y ago
To Google's credit, it's literally the first search results for "how do I remove myself from Google". It is a bit ironic that people looking to remove something for being too easy to find via search are being stymied by a simple search. Still, good to provide some visibility about it. I certainly never knew this was a thing.
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  First result...under 4 ads that probably make you pay to do the thing google does for free for you.
  - jfrunyon 5y ago
    I get 0 ads on that search. The very first result, above anything but their header, is https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/3111061 https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/3111061 .
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      Since there are conflicting reports, allow me a stupid question: you're not running adblock?
    - fb13 5y ago
      3 ads + featured snippet before the result for me.
  - legitster 5y ago
    A weird example of Google creating business for third parties.
  - minsc__and__boo 5y ago
    2 ads and a card linking directly to the Google support article explaining how to remove it here.
    - 5y ago
seumars 5y ago
What's also surprising is how bad Google is at processing these requests. It’s almost like a PR stunt. I’ve had to use their EU Privacy Removal form in the past and a single response can take anything from a few days to several weeks to no response at all. Half the time it seems like you’re emailing a bot as I’ve received the same canned reply to simple inquiries. In the end I just gave up.
paxys 5y ago
Not always voluntary. They have to do this by law in a lot of countries.
- gnopgnip 5y ago
  By law wouldn't really be voluntary
renewiltord 5y ago
Well, they kind of have to, right? Right to be forgotten and all that.
- sneak 5y ago
  The right to be forgotten only applies to people to whom the GDPR applies, which is a minority of Google users.
Blikkentrekker 5y ago
On a slightly unrelated but nevertheless interesting issue: a while back I wanted to find an “incel” board to see how discourse thereon actually was, and Google returned no direct results to any of them but DuckDuckGo immediately returned the results one might expect when searching “incel forum”.
- Der_Einzige 5y ago
  That's particularly sad. It is proof that the incel community really does enough "damage" that they have to be suppressed. I am curious as to when this was removed, and why it was removed.
joecool1029 5y ago
Cool, the section "Remove content about me on sites with exploitative removal practices from Google" seems custom-crafted to handle sites like RipoffReport. https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9172218 https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9172218
- sneak 5y ago
  Which makes one wonder why Google doesn't simply make it a policy to delist sites like RipoffReport and the mugshot harvesting sites (and public-record-PII-publishing sites) as spammy dictionary bullshit in the first place and be proactive about this. They run the index, they get to decide what's in it or not.
spondyl 5y ago
I'd like to take this opportunity to share some relevant exercepts from In The Plex[^1] about Eric Schmidt, then-CEO of Google. > One day Denise Griffin got a call from Eric Schmidt’s assistant. “There’s this information about Eric in the indexes,” she told Griffin. “And we want it out.” In Griffin’s recollection, it dealt with donor information from a political campaign, exactly the type of public information that Google dedicated itself to making accessible. Griffin explained that it wasn’t Google policy to take things like that out of the index just because people didn’t want it there. Principles always make sense until it’s personal,” she says. > Then in July 2005, a CNET reporter used Schmidt as an example of how much personal information Google search could expose. Though she used only information that anyone would see if they typed Schmidt’s name into his company’s search box, Schmidt was so furious that he blackballed the news organization for a year. > “My personal view is that private information that is really private, you should be able to delete from history,” Schmidt once said. But that wasn’t Google’s policy... I guess they've since changed the policy a bit? [^1]: https://www.amazon.com/Plex-Google-Thinks-Works-Shapes/dp/1416596585 https://www.amazon.com/Plex-Google-Thinks-Works-Shapes/dp/14...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jhncls 5y ago
  Is this the same Eric Schmidt as in "If You Have Something You Don’t Want Anyone To Know, Maybe You Shouldn’t Be Doing It"? [0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/google-ceo-on-privacy-if_n_383105 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/google-ceo-on-privacy-if_n_38...
  - moultano 5y ago
    The context of that quote was him explaining that Google has to comply with legal government requests for information.
    - perryizgr8 5y ago
      Which doesn't really change the meaning in any way.
wly_cdgr 5y ago
This feature is certain to be abused & should really not exist despite the good it may do in specific cases
wly_cdgr 5y ago
This feature is certain to be abused & really should not exist despite the good it may do in specific cases
swayvil 5y ago
One might even say that they filter their results in order to promote a preferred ideology. To propagandize us, even. Search any modern hot topic on Google. Do the same on one of the various alternative search engines (duckduckgo, for example). Compare the results. It's educational.
- advisedwang 5y ago
  Read the tweets and docs. This is about removing personal info from Google, not general ideology.
  - swayvil 5y ago
    I know. But it's just one facet of a greater syndrome.
- arp242 5y ago
  Ah yes, those brilliant uncensored DDG search results: https://imgur.com/a/WWXpsnk https://imgur.com/a/WWXpsnk My goal, in case it's not clear, was to find out more about how dates are commonly used in Cambodia (for some localisation code I was writing). DDG just gave me "uncensored" spam sites about dating Cambodian women (I didn't check any of them out, but I'd wager quite a few, if not all, are just scams, if not worse). And while the Google results also weren't quite what I was looking for, it sure was a hell of a lot more relevant. And this is with safe-search on.
  - swayvil 5y ago
    what are you trying to say?
godmode2019 5y ago
Google sends itself take down requests, you can see them at the bottom of the search results. I was surprised by this
sebow 5y ago
Google removes whatever they want from search results.
NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
They remove tons of stuff as they're run by Democrats: https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=&cycle=2020&state=&zip=&employ=Google&jurisdiction=&cand=&type= https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=&cycle... Use DuckDuckGo. Google is a neoliberal censor.
WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
Kash Hill is a journalistic treasure. It's a better world with her in it
vmception 5y ago
I want the EU right to be forgotten
- bigbossgalasso 5y ago
  Right to be forgotten is also a good way to make impopular people disappear. To cull the enemy talent pool. You just need a paper that justifies it. Google probably just wants to prevent criticism of Google employees and get one step closer to preventing criticism of themselves.
WediBlino 5y ago
The music and movie industry do this on an industrial scale, removing hundreds of thousand hits a day. https://www.bpi.co.uk/news-analysis/bpi-sends-500-millionth-illegal-link-to-google-for-removal-from-search-results/ https://www.bpi.co.uk/news-analysis/bpi-sends-500-millionth-... https://transparencyreport.google.com/copyright/reporters/1847?request_by_org=size:10;org:1847; https://transparencyreport.google.com/copyright/reporters/18... It raises the question of how they can find that many hits to be removed, they must be spamming the hell out of the index, and Google must be allowing it/providing an API.
rurban 5y ago
Few people know that Google Search also voluntarily censors search results for political reasons. Probably by request of CIA/State department. Such blacklists appeared on wikileaks. Which was esp. ironic that Google employees fought the very same feature on the search product for the Chinese market "Dragonfly" (blacklisting tianmanmen and such)
ricardo81 5y ago
It really wouldn't be so much of a problem if Google didn't command 90%+ market share in many countries. Anecdotally I remember a fine example from a few years ago when Matt Cutts proclaimed they had algorithmically solved spam for queries such as payday loans. A day later, one appeared with Mr Cutts selling payday loans. It was removed within 24 hours. [0] https://www.seroundtable.com/google-payday-loan-cutts-16940.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-payday-loan-cutts-16940....
kroeckx 5y ago
I'm a dox victim and live in Europe. I've tried to use my right to be forgotten and used Google's removal request, to which the answer was: "It is Google’s understanding that the information about you on this URL - with regard to all the circumstances of the case we are aware of - is still relevant in relation to the purposes of data processing, and therefore the reference to this document in our search results is justified by the public interest. Based on the information available to us at this time, Google LLC has decided not to take action on this URL." I've now tried the other URL, but I doubt this will help.
swiley 5y ago
Was there ever an explanation for why duckduck go prevented searching for the "tankman" image the other week? Google fixed it pretty fast but last I checked it's still blocked on duckduckgo.
selimthegrim 5y ago
Sure they do. Try searching a certain Frank Zappa song about "Yemenite holes" - its track listing has been removed.

717 points by danso 5y ago

Couldn't fit the whole tweet, so just to be clear, she's talking about manual, non-legal requests: > One of the surprising things about working on the slander series is how few people in the field, even experts, know that Google voluntarily removes some search results. (No court order needed!) You have to visit this generic url: https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/3111061?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/3111061?... Down the thread, she adds this: > Because so few people know about it, "reputation managers" are charging people like $500 a pop to "remove damaging information from Google results." And ALL THEY DO is fill out that form for free. Someone tried to hawk this service to my husband after he came under attack. I didn't know about this service URL, and had just assumed "reputation managers", if they did anything at all, were limited to SEO spamming. edit: Searched HN for mention of this link and found exactly 5 results, 3 of which look unique, and the earliest in Dec. 23, 2015: https://imgur.com/EEUJn9M https://imgur.com/EEUJn9M

tyingq 5y ago
They are fairly narrow categories though, and don't handle things like mugshot sites, even if it's something you were arrested...but not convicted for. Still useful to know for sure.
- joshuamorton 5y ago
  Mugshot sites might be covered by https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9172218 https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9172218, but it depends. [disclosure: I'm a googler, but no clue about this service]
  - tyingq 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure the mugshot sites have adjusted their practices where it's much harder to prove what's really going on. Straight up blackmail payment pages are gone.
    - Rasta1s 5y ago
      Aren't mugshots public records?
      - jrockway 5y ago
        It's the great "public" vs. "publicized" debate.
      - tyingq 5y ago
        Sort of. Some police departments publish them, some don't. Some publish them only day of, then remove them. Some only show them if you do the right kind of search (last/first/ maybe + birth). The predatory mugshot sites scrape these variations and publish them in a "forever" way, with lots of SEO tricks. Then basically shake you down for payment to remove them.
      - mike_d 5y ago
        Technically yes, but they are removed when a person is found not guilty or released without being charged thus protecting the innocent and falsely accused. The mugshot sites capitalize on this by scraping the government websites and archiving them forever - until you pay a removal fee. Mugshots.com was doing exactly this until they got hit with extortion charges: https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-mugshot-website-owners-extortion-20180518-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-mugshot-websi...
        Rasta1s 5y ago
        " Technically yes, but they are removed when a person is found not guilty or released without being charged thus protecting the innocent and falsely accused. The mugshot sites capitalize on this by scraping the government websites and archiving them forever - until you pay a removal fee." I don't believe anyone has an obligation to remove if someone found not guilty. The arrest happened, that's a fact. The information is public was made public by the government, that's also a fact. From my understanding once something is made public you can't put it back in the bag. The government may do so on their own databases (Ie. Expungement, removal from government databases) but that doesn't apply to the public and especially not to publications who have first amendment right to publish public records. I looked up the case you mentioned, it's still pending and the arguments made by the government are questionable https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180523/10224639892/california-prosecutors-arrest-website-owners-allowing-money-to-influence-which-public-records-they-host.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180523/10224639892/calif...
judge2020 5y ago
This might also include what is required to comply with GDPR’s right to be forgotten, if that’s still a thing.
- vitus 5y ago
  That's a different form! https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/legal-removal-request?complaint_type=rtbf https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/legal-removal-reques...
majormajor 5y ago
> Because so few people know about it, "reputation managers" are charging people like $500 a pop to "remove damaging information from Google results." And ALL THEY DO is fill out that form for free. Someone tried to hawk this service to my husband after he came under attack. While that sounds like a high price, and you usually don't want to just hire the first person you see advertise a service, the concept of specialization there, and some people just not wanting to devote the time to becoming experts everywhere, seems perfectly fine and normal. People often pay electricians even for tasks that are just "flip a switch and turn some screws," after all.
- deleted 5y ago
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- sombremesa 5y ago
  Electricity can kill you. Doesn't seem like a good comparison.
  - amelius 5y ago
    Ending up in a Google search result can too, I suppose, in some indirect way.
    - sombremesa 5y ago
      Help me with how this is relevant. Is the person you hired to scrub your Google result risking getting doxxed?
      - sumedh 5y ago
        I assume the point was that anything negative about you ends up on Google it can lead to mental issues and in a worst case scenario you might take your life so its better you hire a professional to scrub it for you.
        amelius 5y ago
gist 5y ago
> are charging people like $500 a pop to "remove damaging information from Google results." And ALL THEY DO is fill out that form for free. Someone tried to hawk this service to my husband after he came under attack. 'ALL THEY DO' is what anyone does in a similar way. You are paying for what they know that you don't know how to do. There is nothing wrong or deceptive about making money in this way. (use of 'all they do' seems to imply this). Plenty of people are busy and willing to pay for things to have someone else handle the details. Google could easily publicize this but they choose not to. Here is the thing. Someone charging $500 (or any amount) has already filtered people that feel they have a real need from everyone attempting to do similar. Now you could argue the fee should be less but the friction caused by that higher fee (for those who can afford it) is worth it. And those that can't can do research and effort (like with anything) to find a way to achieve the same. People often expect everything to be free and nobody to make money off of knowledge. By the way if reputation managers are charging $500 nothing to prevent someone from doing the same for less and changing the market price. Also I'd image the rep managers possibly massage some things to get the job done something many people wouldn't know or want to do.
- crispyambulance 5y ago
  > There is nothing wrong or deceptive about making money in this way. Absolutely incorrect. It's more complicated and insidious than your reductive argument suggests. These reputation "management" companies are also the ones who scrape public records on a massive scale and DELIBERATELY place this data really high up in search rankings. So, casual searches for someone's name often end up returning vague negative results like "xxx has a criminal record, find out more!". They ALSO spam people at internet scale and warn them about their "reputation" and how they can "fix" it. In other words, they provide the "cure" for the "injury" which they've caused. One of the worst and biggest of these piece of sh*t companies is mylife.com. They do the web-scraping and the SEO to get their results up high, AND ALSO charge money to "clean up" reputations. It happens to be legal in the USA because we're in a downward spiral of techno-feudalism, but it's a vile and dishonorable practice. The founder of mylife.com, Jeffery Tinsely, has become wealthy from these deceptive practices. He faces regular lawsuits (eg https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/info-2020/website-sued-mylife.html https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/info-2020/website-sue...). But somehow mylife.com continues to survive presumably by raking in the cash as well as VC investment (not sure if it was mylife or one of the other slimy companies run by Tinsely). FWIW, it is possible to remove your results from mylife.com. I did it. It requires a phone call and some firm persistence and patience. You call them on the phone and talk to someone at an Indian call center. Just say that you want to remove your name from mylife.com searches. It costs nothing but they WILL try to sell you their junk reputation management service with boiler-room-like intensity (worse than Verizon or Comcast), just decline for the 2 dozen times they ask. In the end it worked, I am no longer searchable on mylife.com and no mylife.com results show up on google under my name, but I get several emails a day from these MF's telling me that my reputation needs fixing and that "other people can see it". There's other companies like this. Mylife is particularly slimy but it's the biggest.
tlogan 5y ago
There is saying in Balkan countries: (my translation) “who knows knows, who does not know then it is 500 deutsche marks (dinars, etc.)”.
reaperducer 5y ago
And ALL THEY DO is fill out that form for free. Someone tried to hawk this service to my husband after he came under attack. It's like I tell my boss: "You don't pay me to push buttons. You pay me to know which buttons to push." (I think I stole it from the plumbing industry.)
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f38zf5vdt 5y ago

...what? I've known of this for at least a decade. Do people expect Google to be some free-for-all of unmoderated knowledge that can be used to defame and degrade others?

danso 5y ago
The author of the tweet also wrote a major NYT story about the topic earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25972121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25972121 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/30/technology/change-my-google-results.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/30/technology/change-my-goog... The story focuses on a software engineer who discovered that he was the slander target of someone who had been fired by his father 30 years ago. He found her identity and took her to court in 2018. But the libelous Google results didn't change. The NYT story even ends with this: > Yet even that hasn’t solved the problem. See for yourself: Do a Google search for “Guy Babcock.” A day after the NYT story, those results disappeared. Here's what they looked like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25973045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25973045 If a software engineer with the resources to find and take an anonymous libeler didn't know that Google could manually intervene and remove results that listed him as a pedophile, I'm assuming the vast majority of people are equally unaware.
- forgotpwd16 5y ago
  >Until recently, Google would remove a website from your results only if it could cause financial damage, such as by exposing your Social Security number. Now Google will remove other harmful content, including revenge porn and private medical information. No wonder few people know it. On the "until recently" checking the Internet Archive[0], removal of any personal information was introduced to their page at end of 2019. Before then the only way was removing the information from the sites to which the result link pointed. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20191229062036/https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/3111061?hl=en https://web.archive.org/web/20191229062036/https://support.g...
sneak 5y ago
https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/

kaliali 5y ago

I would've thought more people would realize this from last years US election. That's too bad.

toby- 5y ago

If people don't know about this, they haven't been paying attention. I find the idea that 'even experts' (haha) don't know about this rather hilarious.

H8crilA 5y ago
Toby, I haven't laughed so hard in a month.

throwaaskjdfh 5y ago

What does the Internet Archive/Wayback Machine do in similar circumstances?

paulpauper 5y ago
i am sure they will also remove stuff, but most ppl such as employers just do a google search
dredmorbius 5y ago
The Internet Archive may, in appropriate circumstances and at its discretion, remove certain content or disable access to content that appears to infringe the copyright or other intellectual property rights of others. https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360004716091-Wayback-Machine-General-Information https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360004716091-Wayb... In practice, IA will unpublish content on request to info@archive.org AFAIU

deertick1 5y ago

Yeah also if you compare results from google vs duckduckgo for controversial search terms like "I don't care about gender identity" Google will return only content that tells you why that opinion is wrong e.g. "why you should care about gender identity" Whereas duckduckgo will return stuff that actually matches your search. Google always errs on the side of left wing political platform. Its actually really egregious once you start testing it out. To the point that google actually completely buries really valuable information such as primary sources for controversial events, scientific studies etc and instead promotes shitty wapo articles ans the like that tell you how to think about the thing you are actually searching for.

PhantomGremlin 5y ago
Whereas duckduckgo will return stuff that actually matches your search. One upon a time Google was a really cool search engine. Entire books were written about how to use it wisely. E.g. Google Hacks 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/google-hacks/0596004478/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/google-hacks/0596004478... Now, it's impossible to properly qualify searches. Quotes don't mean shit. Appending "&tbs=li:1" to get verbatim results doesn't mean shit. Google just does whatever the hell it wants to. Which is probably great for the unwashed masses but really sucks for advanced users.
- deertick1 5y ago
  Thank you. Could not agree more. I remember when you could finesse google for really odd or specific shit and its damn near impossible now.
meisel 5y ago
Can you provide more examples of this?
- quacked 5y ago
  Look up "proof the moon landing was fake". I have an aerospace degree and don't think it was fake, but I still find it strange that Google won't return any of the conspiracy pages I enjoyed reading about a decade ago.

drdavid 5y ago

I wonder what checks and balances are in place. Can someone be a complete dirtbag and request that legitimate criticism be removed simply because they don't want folks to know they're a dirtbag? Can convicts request the results be removed? How about sex offenders? How about people convicted of domestic violence assaults or similar?

k2xl 5y ago
What I was wondering is how do they verify that the person is the one requesting themselves be removed? Can you technically have all results of someone that you don't like be removed? I could see that harming businesses if your name is often associated with your websites around your business.
vmception 5y ago
Its a check on the state. You can still go to individual services or your local municipality and ask.
srj 5y ago
The policy in question covers websites that post individual's information and charge a fee for removal. Disclaimer: Work at Google in this area.

dkokelley 5y ago

This is an example of a large central authority censoring information. How does the notion of a purely distributed, unregulated, uncensorable, blockchain-backed internet handle "revenge porn" or other genuinely harmful content? An argument I hear from the crypto community is that blockchain is good because it enables freedom of speech that can't be banned by governments or other central authorities. The crypto community needs to address the other side of that coin too. Are there circumstances when something should be banned, and how does that work on a blockchain?

jedimastert 5y ago
So, like, I get what you're saying, but I feel like you didn't actually look past the title of the post. This isn't governments censoring information or whatever, it's a form you can fill out to request removal of coerced personal information like revenge porn or doxxing.
- dkokelley 5y ago
  I understand what the post is saying. I see this as an example of censorship (by Google in this case) being a GOOD thing. This caused me to wonder about how a decentralized platform would handle similar circumstances.
  - jedimastert 5y ago
    Whelp color me an ass for commenting about not reading past the headline while also completely missing the main crux of your argument! That's my b
narrator 5y ago
When talking about the blockchain and other voluntary systems, I tend to look at these things from a "what if there was no government that could just use physical coercion to implement its laws, how would you get people to voluntarily sign up for this?" perspective for these kinds of problems. You would get users to sign the social contract with some online entity and that entity would censor the blockchain for their ideological/legal jurisdiction. For example, you could sign the Christian fundamentalist social contract and have all blasphemy removed from your search results. In exchange, you would receive community support, access to their content, etc. If they found out you were browsing blasphemous material they would revoke the particular social contract you signed. Just spitballing here, but I wonder if the nofap guys could start something like this to block all nsfw content on whatever distributed blockchain thing was out there. Then they could offer some special forum as a benefit. You could use a DAO for governance conflicts, etc.

legitster 5y ago

To Google's credit, it's literally the first search results for "how do I remove myself from Google". It is a bit ironic that people looking to remove something for being too easy to find via search are being stymied by a simple search. Still, good to provide some visibility about it. I certainly never knew this was a thing.

oh_sigh 5y ago
First result...under 4 ads that probably make you pay to do the thing google does for free for you.
- jfrunyon 5y ago
  I get 0 ads on that search. The very first result, above anything but their header, is https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/3111061 https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/3111061 .
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    Since there are conflicting reports, allow me a stupid question: you're not running adblock?
  - fb13 5y ago
    3 ads + featured snippet before the result for me.
- legitster 5y ago
  A weird example of Google creating business for third parties.
- minsc__and__boo 5y ago
  2 ads and a card linking directly to the Google support article explaining how to remove it here.
  - 5y ago

seumars 5y ago

What's also surprising is how bad Google is at processing these requests. It’s almost like a PR stunt. I’ve had to use their EU Privacy Removal form in the past and a single response can take anything from a few days to several weeks to no response at all. Half the time it seems like you’re emailing a bot as I’ve received the same canned reply to simple inquiries. In the end I just gave up.

paxys 5y ago

Not always voluntary. They have to do this by law in a lot of countries.

gnopgnip 5y ago
By law wouldn't really be voluntary

renewiltord 5y ago

Well, they kind of have to, right? Right to be forgotten and all that.

sneak 5y ago
The right to be forgotten only applies to people to whom the GDPR applies, which is a minority of Google users.

Blikkentrekker 5y ago

On a slightly unrelated but nevertheless interesting issue: a while back I wanted to find an “incel” board to see how discourse thereon actually was, and Google returned no direct results to any of them but DuckDuckGo immediately returned the results one might expect when searching “incel forum”.

Der_Einzige 5y ago
That's particularly sad. It is proof that the incel community really does enough "damage" that they have to be suppressed. I am curious as to when this was removed, and why it was removed.

joecool1029 5y ago

Cool, the section "Remove content about me on sites with exploitative removal practices from Google" seems custom-crafted to handle sites like RipoffReport. https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9172218 https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9172218

sneak 5y ago
Which makes one wonder why Google doesn't simply make it a policy to delist sites like RipoffReport and the mugshot harvesting sites (and public-record-PII-publishing sites) as spammy dictionary bullshit in the first place and be proactive about this. They run the index, they get to decide what's in it or not.

spondyl 5y ago

I'd like to take this opportunity to share some relevant exercepts from In The Plex[^1] about Eric Schmidt, then-CEO of Google. > One day Denise Griffin got a call from Eric Schmidt’s assistant. “There’s this information about Eric in the indexes,” she told Griffin. “And we want it out.” In Griffin’s recollection, it dealt with donor information from a political campaign, exactly the type of public information that Google dedicated itself to making accessible. Griffin explained that it wasn’t Google policy to take things like that out of the index just because people didn’t want it there. Principles always make sense until it’s personal,” she says. > Then in July 2005, a CNET reporter used Schmidt as an example of how much personal information Google search could expose. Though she used only information that anyone would see if they typed Schmidt’s name into his company’s search box, Schmidt was so furious that he blackballed the news organization for a year. > “My personal view is that private information that is really private, you should be able to delete from history,” Schmidt once said. But that wasn’t Google’s policy... I guess they've since changed the policy a bit? [^1]: https://www.amazon.com/Plex-Google-Thinks-Works-Shapes/dp/1416596585 https://www.amazon.com/Plex-Google-Thinks-Works-Shapes/dp/14...

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jhncls 5y ago
Is this the same Eric Schmidt as in "If You Have Something You Don’t Want Anyone To Know, Maybe You Shouldn’t Be Doing It"? [0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/google-ceo-on-privacy-if_n_383105 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/google-ceo-on-privacy-if_n_38...
- moultano 5y ago
  The context of that quote was him explaining that Google has to comply with legal government requests for information.
  - perryizgr8 5y ago
    Which doesn't really change the meaning in any way.

wly_cdgr 5y ago

This feature is certain to be abused & should really not exist despite the good it may do in specific cases

wly_cdgr 5y ago

This feature is certain to be abused & really should not exist despite the good it may do in specific cases

swayvil 5y ago

One might even say that they filter their results in order to promote a preferred ideology. To propagandize us, even. Search any modern hot topic on Google. Do the same on one of the various alternative search engines (duckduckgo, for example). Compare the results. It's educational.

advisedwang 5y ago
Read the tweets and docs. This is about removing personal info from Google, not general ideology.
- swayvil 5y ago
  I know. But it's just one facet of a greater syndrome.
arp242 5y ago
Ah yes, those brilliant uncensored DDG search results: https://imgur.com/a/WWXpsnk https://imgur.com/a/WWXpsnk My goal, in case it's not clear, was to find out more about how dates are commonly used in Cambodia (for some localisation code I was writing). DDG just gave me "uncensored" spam sites about dating Cambodian women (I didn't check any of them out, but I'd wager quite a few, if not all, are just scams, if not worse). And while the Google results also weren't quite what I was looking for, it sure was a hell of a lot more relevant. And this is with safe-search on.
- swayvil 5y ago
  what are you trying to say?

godmode2019 5y ago

Google sends itself take down requests, you can see them at the bottom of the search results. I was surprised by this

sebow 5y ago

Google removes whatever they want from search results.

NaturalPhallacy 5y ago

They remove tons of stuff as they're run by Democrats: https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=&cycle=2020&state=&zip=&employ=Google&jurisdiction=&cand=&type= https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=&cycle... Use DuckDuckGo. Google is a neoliberal censor.

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago

Kash Hill is a journalistic treasure. It's a better world with her in it

vmception 5y ago

I want the EU right to be forgotten

bigbossgalasso 5y ago
Right to be forgotten is also a good way to make impopular people disappear. To cull the enemy talent pool. You just need a paper that justifies it. Google probably just wants to prevent criticism of Google employees and get one step closer to preventing criticism of themselves.

WediBlino 5y ago

The music and movie industry do this on an industrial scale, removing hundreds of thousand hits a day. https://www.bpi.co.uk/news-analysis/bpi-sends-500-millionth-illegal-link-to-google-for-removal-from-search-results/ https://www.bpi.co.uk/news-analysis/bpi-sends-500-millionth-... https://transparencyreport.google.com/copyright/reporters/1847?request_by_org=size:10;org:1847; https://transparencyreport.google.com/copyright/reporters/18... It raises the question of how they can find that many hits to be removed, they must be spamming the hell out of the index, and Google must be allowing it/providing an API.

rurban 5y ago

Few people know that Google Search also voluntarily censors search results for political reasons. Probably by request of CIA/State department. Such blacklists appeared on wikileaks. Which was esp. ironic that Google employees fought the very same feature on the search product for the Chinese market "Dragonfly" (blacklisting tianmanmen and such)

ricardo81 5y ago

It really wouldn't be so much of a problem if Google didn't command 90%+ market share in many countries. Anecdotally I remember a fine example from a few years ago when Matt Cutts proclaimed they had algorithmically solved spam for queries such as payday loans. A day later, one appeared with Mr Cutts selling payday loans. It was removed within 24 hours. [0] https://www.seroundtable.com/google-payday-loan-cutts-16940.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-payday-loan-cutts-16940....

kroeckx 5y ago

I'm a dox victim and live in Europe. I've tried to use my right to be forgotten and used Google's removal request, to which the answer was: "It is Google’s understanding that the information about you on this URL - with regard to all the circumstances of the case we are aware of - is still relevant in relation to the purposes of data processing, and therefore the reference to this document in our search results is justified by the public interest. Based on the information available to us at this time, Google LLC has decided not to take action on this URL." I've now tried the other URL, but I doubt this will help.

swiley 5y ago

Was there ever an explanation for why duckduck go prevented searching for the "tankman" image the other week? Google fixed it pretty fast but last I checked it's still blocked on duckduckgo.

selimthegrim 5y ago

Sure they do. Try searching a certain Frank Zappa song about "Yemenite holes" - its track listing has been removed.