MacOS Spotlight Privacy List Error

When attempting to add a folder to the exclusion list in Spotlight in MacOS Catalina, the UI would return a “Privacy List Error.” After many maddening hours of troubleshooting and research. Here’s how I fixed it:

Boot into recovery mode and disable System Integrity Protection by opening the Terminal from the Utilities menu, and entering the following:

csrutil disable

Reboot (you can just type reboot into the terminal, and press enter to accomplish this

Login to your mac as an administrative user.

Open System preferences > Users & Groups

Click the lock icon at the bottom of the screen to unlock the settings.

Click Login Options > Join (Beside Network Account Server) > Open Directory Utility…

In Directory Utility, click the lock icon at the bottom of the screen to unlock the settings.

In the Directory Utility menu at the top of the screen, click Edit > Enable Root User and give it a password you will remember.

Close Directory Utility and System Preferences.

Open Terminal

Disable the Spotlight daemon by running

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

Use your own password for sudo commands

Disable Spotlight indexing by running

sudo mdutil -a -i off

Become the root user by running

su

Enter the password you just made for the root user

Delete the Spotlight index by running

rm -rf /System/Volumes/Data/.Spotlight-V100

Quit su by running

exit

Enable the Spotlight daemon by running

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

Enable Spotlight indexing by running

sudo mdutil -a -i on

Reindex all volumes by running

sudo mdutil -aE

Go back into Directory Utility and disable the root user from the same menu where you enabled the root user.

When indexing is complete, reboot into recovery mode, open the terminal and run the following to enable System Integrity Protection.

csrutil enable