Danielle Romain: Google’s New Censorship Queen

Danielle Marise Romain is the new queen of censorship at Google. She wasn’t on our radar last year so she is not part of the Most Wanted deck, but she would have been on it had the deck been created today. As long as Google keeps finding new people to stick their heads up and take credit for censoring the internet we will have people to research and post about on this site.

Romain became a problem this past May when she appeared in the YouTube video below. In the video she announced a feature for suppressing specific pages from appearing in queries for names of specific people. All those people have to do is submit a complaint to Google alleging that their home address, phone number, or email address appears on the page.

We’ve been meaning to write about Romain for months now but finally found motivation after most of our sites were suppressed in name queries this past week. This always creates more work for us to recover our rankings and we are tired of it. We shouldn’t have to do anything beyond making sure our servers are running properly and promoting our sites but now we have to deal these ridiculous penalties. Whenever Google creates a penalty which makes it harder for people to find what they are looking for online they damage their core product at our expense. If we want to find someone’s address then the best search engine results are the ones with addresses in them. Same goes if we are looking for information about a person, but you’re hard pressed to find what their ex has to say on Google just because they get bombarded with complaints.

We have every right to be angry because Google illegally informed Congress years ago that it is not possible for their employees to manually manipulate search engine rankings. The existence of this suppression system by itself proves Google CEO Sundar Pichai committed perjury. We have been directly harmed as a result of Google doing what they told Congress they wouldn’t allow employees to do. Google claims their “mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Then stuck to that long enough to take over 90% of the search engine market but they don’t stick to that anymore. Every so often you’ll hear of a new announcement from Google which begins with their mission statement followed by a direct contradiction. For instance, Romain posted, “we strongly believe in open access to information, and we also have a deep commitment to protecting people — and their privacy — online.” That was followed by a statement that Google wants to make it as easy as possible for people to control search engine results about themselves. Think about what this means for the reliability of Google search results in the future. There is a reason why people are rarely put in charge of their own performance reviews because people would always give themselves high marks. Putting people in control over what appears in Google searches effectively eliminates Google as a reliable source of information about people.

Google employees manipulate search engine rankings by reviewing complaints from the public, adding names of people to a suppression list, and adding names of sites to a second suppression list. Originally, Google claimed the sites on the second list would only be demoted for queries containing names from the first list. They have since admitted to what we noticed right away, that the sites on the second list are suppressed for all name queries not just the names on the first list.

To make matters worse, they have basically categorized online criticism as spam whenever the site hosting it is nice enough to remove it for a reasonable fee. Sites that sell personal information like Radaris and other people search sites remain unharmed despite being mostly duplicate content. Whether content is spam or not depends on the content not the removal policy of the site hosting it but you wouldn’t know that by talking to Google. Why they would waste time and resources making it harder for people to find information they’re looking for online remains a mystery. Personal information is not spam but Google has an entire section their new spam policy dedicated to “online harassment” which they define broadly. They also fail to distinguish between government officials and regular people. The personal information of government officials is an essential tool for the people because if done right it forces the official to hear them. We often get complaints from people who say they would just ignore us but can’t because we posted their address. Google is making it possible for the government to ignore people again simply by complaining to Google. Accurate public records posted online to criticize a person is not spam.

Where She Lives

The last known home address we would find for Danielle Romain is 3390 Eichers Pl. Unit 111, Santa Clara, California 95051-1494. The property is a condominium listed in public records as being owned by Romain but keep in mind that our background check service has been known to be outdated by 6-12 months at time.

She is also listed as the property owner of 8510 Tombron Grove Road, Magnolia, Texas 77354. We are fairly confident we have the right Danielle Romain because the records for this person include addresses in Cambridge, Massachusetts dated at the same time Romain attended Harvard University according to Rocket Reach.