A few years ago, all of my sites were flagged because of "PII" (personally identifiable information). The problem was that I was plugging in the author's username in the address bar unencrypted; eg, you could see my classified ads by going to:

example.com/classifieds/csdude55

But usernames that looked like a real name or email address were a violation of Google's policy. So I had to quickly revise all of my websites, forcing an encrypted version of that link:

example.com/classifieds/ZWFzdGJl

This change caused me to lose some search engine placement, and of course people stopped sharing this weird-looking link on social media.

I recently came across this, though:

Google has quietly dropped ban on personally identifiable web tracking
[thenextweb.com...]

I'm not sure if I'm understanding it correctly, though. Can anyone confirm that my original format would no longer be a PII violation, and I can go back to using it?