Opt out of displaying personal contact info and home address of Kagi users in search results

SearchFeedback

Whenever I search for names of myself, friends and family there are results that display our home addresses, cell numbers, emails, etc. All of this info is in the website title and the description.

It is coming from data brokers such as nuwber.com, cocofinder.com, radaris.com, officialusa.com, truepeoplesearch.com, fastpeoplesearch.com, truthfinder.com, beenverified, peoplefinder, etc.

Would it be possible to have a link in the 3 dot dropdown menu beside the results to request removal of personal contact information? Or to exclude these poor quality sites in the first place?

This picture is just an example of someone's info when searching name. This can be very dangerous especially if someone is facing stalking and seems out of place for a privacy focused search engine. I think this might even be against privacy laws if there isn't a way to request removal.

Thank you.

Jop

You’ll have to request the sites themselves to remove the info. Even if Kagi removed them you would still be able to reach them through other search engines.

SearchFeedback

Jop some of the sites have removed the info, but it is still showing up in Kagi results since the personal info is actually displayed on Kagi's website.

MagicMouse

It is likely that Kagi will need to offer a route to request de-referencing of EU citizens, at least for users accessing the site from the EU, in order to comply with GDPR. See: https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2019-09/cp190112en.pdf

Vlad

We are actually thinking of partnering with a personal info removal service. I think that would be quite a useful service for Kagi customers. the only problem is most of these services cost around ~$200 USD year to keep your personal info opted out on theese websites and we ar elooking for a solution that is good enough but does not break the bank.

The EU ruling is interesting one. I think it runs into problems of disambiguiation, if my name is John Smith, can i request a search to remove all pages in the index that contain John Smith?

https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html?url=https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2019-09/cp190112en.pdf&target_language=&summary=summary

SearchFeedback

Vlad A service like that would be helpful for removing it from the origin, and keep it off on an ongoing basis.

However it seems to be that even after completely removing the data from these websites, it is still showing the personal contact info directly on Kagi's website because it is in the link title and description.

The contact information is either stored directly on Kagi's server, or there is a cache it is picking up from a partner index that is unrelated to the original website.

Google has the ability to request personal information like this to be removed:

https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/3111061?hl=en&ref_topic=3285072&sjid=10603885210559377011-NA

It may be that eventually the web crawler would update it, but that could take awhile. Another problem is that some of the most malicious sites do not care about privacy laws and will not remove the info ever, or want thousands of dollars in blackmail.

I do not know if legally a John Smith could request to remove everything with his name in the EU. The problem is mostly when it includes a name plus phone number, email, and/or home address displayed directly in search results. This would rule out the other John Smith's who would not share that info.

Jop

Vlad The EU ruling is interesting one. I think it runs into problems of disambiguiation, if my name is John Smith, can i request a search to remove all pages in the index that contain John Smith?

I think they have to submit evidence that the pages in question are about them. But Google and Microsoft probably have an entire team to deal with these cases, which you don’t 🙁 I don’t know if these “right to be forgotten” laws are thought through that well - the likely main purpose of them is to give politicians the ability to censor negative coverage of themselves from search engines.

SearchFeedback

Jop The reason it is important to me is for my sister. Her violent ex husband finds her home through these websites and travels to different states just to target her.

Plus in general I am interested in privacy, which is what initially had me look for alternatives to Google search.

Jop

SearchFeedback

Sorry about that, hope the police will bother helping.

Kagi’s privacy concept is focused on not recording your search history/interests, not on removing sites that violate your rights - they don’t want to remove piracy websites either. To be fair, it doesn’t matter that much since that stalker (and pirates) probably aren’t using Kagi to begin with, they probably use Google or Bing/DuckDuckGo; and removing results that Google and Bing do have, could lessen the value of Kagi in some people’s eyes.

carl

In my opinion the search engine is not where one should turn to remove personal information, such as adress and phone number. Somebody is publishing that data. Somebody contributed with that data. The best solution is to not contribute that data in the first place. Kagi is of microscopic size compared to Google, so there is very little reason to believe it would be used as a tool for stalkers.

SearchFeedback

carl for sure it is definitely a small service now but it is a good idea to carefully consider privacy policy and laws before it becomes a crisis later. Hoping to see Kagi grow and be around for a long time.

SearchFeedback

Looks like California is working on this as well.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/californias-delete-act-protects-us-data-brokers

Vlad

SearchFeedback yDeleting data from data brokers is what we are thinking of using as this is the root of all evil. Having the regulated and obliged to coply would be a big step towards getting personal info off the web.