Google spam reports with personally identifying information won’t be used and processed

/dans

Google updated its spam report page for the second time in the past week or so, this time to say that if you include personally identifying information, the spam report will not be processed or used. This comes just a week after Google said that information would be used and passed along to the reported site.

What changed. Google posted on its spam report page a new highlight box which says two points:

(1) Don’t include personally identifying information in your spam report.

(2) If you do include personally identifying information, then Google won’t process your submission.

The text block reads:

“Don’t include any personally identifying information in your submission. To comply with regulations, we must send the submission text to the site owner to help them understand the context of a manual action, if one is issued. Because of this, we won’t process your submission if we determine it contains personally identifying information to protect privacy. Not including such information fully ensures your information is safe and prevents your submission from being discarded.”

What was before. As we covered about a week ago, Google said then:

  • “If we issue a manual action, we send whatever you write in the submission report verbatim to the site owner to help them understand the context of the manual action.”

This caused a lot of concern in the industry, not just from fear of being caught calling out your competitors or spammers. But also for legal concerns. Google’s new wording above says this is now to “comply with regulations” where I guess it can’t share personally identifying information.

Why we care. If you want to submit a successful spam report, make sure to not include any personally identifying information. And if you do include personally identifying information by accident, you do not have to worry that the information will be passed along to the reported site. The spam report will just not be processed at all and you can resubmit it.