Ask HN: Did anyone use ruinmysearchhistory and get Google account suspended today?

Post by Daviey » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 10:24 PM UTC

aerovistae wrote: post #17

I'm curious: does anyone know whether Google searches are truly monitored, and how, if it's HTTPS? I showed ruinmysearchhistory.com to a Pakistani Muslim friend, not having clicked it myself, and he thought it was funny until the ISIS application parts started coming up, when he consequently freaked out, as you might imagine. But this got me wondering -- it seems to be widely accepted that googling things like "how t…

Post by asuffield » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 10:27 PM UTC

Daviey wrote: post #61

aerovistae wrote: post #17

I'm curious: does anyone know whether Google searches are truly monitored, and how, if it's HTTPS? I showed ruinmysearchhistory.com to a Pakistani Muslim friend, not having clicked it myself, and he thought it was funny until the ISIS application parts started coming up, when he consequently freaked out, as you might imagine. But this got me wondering -- it seems to be widely accepted that googling things like "how t…

When I was at Google Mountain View in 2009, they had a TV scrolling through current search terms.. Some of them were hilarious...

Post by asuffield » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 10:34 PM UTC

themartorana wrote: post #53

tuna-piano wrote: post #40

I find the serious conversations that came from this funny, seemingly silly project very interesting. 1- The chilling effect of people being scared to click on a link that may do searches their government cares about 2- The idea that if many people used a browser add in like this, it would make surveillance of search history much more difficult 3- Google accounts getting banned All from one silly site.

Could it simply be the speed with which the queries are made, making a bot-blocker suspect a bot? Edit: apologies, meant to reply to OP, not here. To parent, I already upvote your comment - it's pretty cool, but also scary that we now have conversations about whether we're being surveiled by our government (in the US) as a casual normality. The only difference that appears to remain is that we openly talk about our g…

Post by asuffield » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 10:38 PM UTC

Daviey wrote: post #64

asuffield wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google.) It's just displaying this: https://www.google.com/trends/hottrends/visualize?nrow=5&nco...

Oh nice... but it wasn't that in 2009.. and there were some potentially embarrassing search terms display, scrolling past.. but sure, it was probably filtered at some point.

Post by egberts5 » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 10:47 PM UTC