Personal information in a review
A review that publishes someone's private details (a full name plus workplace, a phone number, a home address, medical or financial information) violates Google's policy regardless of whether the rest of the review is accurate.
See Google's full content policy“Do not distribute or post personal information without consent. Personal information is defined as information that applies to a living identifiable person and disclosure could result in risk of harm if it is compromised or misused.”
Qualifies for removal
- Review names a staff member in full and adds their shift pattern, home area, or personal phone number
- Review reproduces an invoice, a medical detail, or an account number
- Review publishes a photo of an employee taken without consent
- Review names a third party, another customer or a child, who never chose to be involved
Does NOT qualify
- Naming a manager by first name in an ordinary service complaint
- Mentioning a role ('the receptionist') without identifying details
Evidence that clears this clause
Whoever reads your report can see the review, the reviewer's public profile and your listing. Nothing else. Anything that lives only in your own systems has to be described, not assumed.
- A home address, personal phone number or email in the review text
- Financial or account details, however partial
- Medical or health information about an identifiable person
- A photograph of an individual posted without consent
The mistake that gets this rejected
Repeating the personal detail in your reply or in the filing itself. Describe the category, for example "the review contains a staff member's personal mobile number", rather than restating the number and spreading it further.
Questions about this clause
Does naming an employee count as personal information?
A first name in a normal service complaint usually does not. It shifts under this clause when combined with contact details, an address, or anything else that identifies them outside work.
What about my own business phone number?
Published business contact details are public information and are not covered by this clause.
Want this policy applied to your reviews?
Run the free audit and we'll score every review on your listing against this policy and the others. No card, no signup to see the report. A removal is $150 to $250 per review, billed only when Google actually removes it.
All of them in one place: the policy reference · check a review against it · Google review policy violations explained · remove fake Google reviews · straight answers · by industry
Free tools
Check a single review against every clause at once, or work out what a removal would actually do to your star average. Both run in your browser, with no account.
The other content-policy categories
A review can break more than one clause at once, and a filing names the clause with the cleanest evidence rather than all of them.
How this plays out in your trade
The same policy clause gets abused differently depending on the business. These pages set out the attack pattern trade by trade.
Short answers about filing
Filing against this clause, start to finish
Knowing which clause a review breaks is the first half. These cover the filing itself, and what a rejection actually means.