So has it been restored yet?
You'd think that someone reading this topic could get that cleared up pretty quickly.
Ask HN: Did anyone use ruinmysearchhistory and get Google account suspended today?
71–80 of 124 posts
Re: Ask HN: Did anyone use ruinmysearchhistory and get Google account suspended today?
#72I'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…
Google retains your full search history, by default, and lets you read all of it. (Google also scans it for ads.) Google most likely also have your real name, address and/or phone number. Do they hand it over to law enforcement/NSA/oppressive regimes? Maybe.
Well, they do if you let them.
For Mirimir, they have no clue. Just a bunch of blind alleys.
Re: Ask HN: Did anyone use ruinmysearchhistory and get Google account suspended today?
#73As I am currently in a North African country I freaked out when the ISIS shit started popping so I immediately deleted my google history and nothing happened now. I still don't get why something so malicious was upvoted so much.
I believe the original intent of that site was to get you on the NSA watch list
Was to overwhelm the NSA watch list with software engineers.
I'm reminded of a Usenet campaign in the mid-late 90s, adding hot terms to sigs.
Re: Ask HN: Did anyone use ruinmysearchhistory and get Google account suspended today?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google.) One might describe it as a social botnet: somebody convinced a bunch of people to execute some code on their computer that sent automated search queries. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66357?hl=en "Google's Terms of Service do not allow the sending of automated queries of any sort to our system without express pe…
What about if they were not performing the searches intentionally? What prevents someone paying to serve an advert that does exactly the same thing?
Re: Ask HN: Did anyone use ruinmysearchhistory and get Google account suspended today?
#75I'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…
I think Google has some monitoring for images of child sexual abuse and terms used to find those images. I'm not sure what they do if you search for those terms or if they just return blank pages. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/18/uk-us-dar...
Well, what did it do when you tried?
Re: Ask HN: Did anyone use ruinmysearchhistory and get Google account suspended today?
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or outed as gay for Googling linux manual pages. "Honey, why do searches for ' man date ' and ' man find ' appear in your your internet history?" - My future wife.
man unzip, man strip, man touch, man finger, man mount, man fsck
K&R et al are dirty, dirty men.
…still not as bad as O_CREAT though.
Re: Ask HN: Did anyone use ruinmysearchhistory and get Google account suspended today?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe the original intent of that site was to get you on the NSA watch list
I always use a VPN so I am not worried about my IP address getting listed somewhere but I only hope Google does delete my search history... Yeah I'm on that list now.
Many VPNs do actually leak your IP address. Beyond that, your VPN traffic could be associated with your billing information for said VPN. Also by coresponding the traffic to the VPN and coming out of the VPN. Or if you have any personal information associated with your Google account or have ever accessed it with an IP associated with you.
Look out the window. They're in the ice cream truck.
Re: Ask HN: Did anyone use ruinmysearchhistory and get Google account suspended today?
#78I'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…
Google is not fully https - its the road customer google that is fully https - internal traffic is not encrypted. And internal traffic goes worldwide for google.
Google's internal traffic is (supposedly¹) encrypted as of 2013.
¹ I have no reason to doubt this is true, but AFAIK the only evidence is that Google said it would be, in response to NSA/GHCQ's MUSCULAR program.
Re: Ask HN: Did anyone use ruinmysearchhistory and get Google account suspended today?
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a small difference between ruining ones search history and being brought to the attention of whatever authority is watching[1]. It does seem like a https://xkcd.com/576/ situation applied to search. 1) I would bet our web filter would be sending me some reports
what part of "ruin" don't you understand ?
"ruin" is completely vague, and you had no idea what it meant until you found out what it ended up meaning.
Funny would be googling fetish porn, not funny would be banning you from international travel.
Re: Ask HN: Did anyone use ruinmysearchhistory and get Google account suspended today?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's never been clear to me whether this is superstition or if there's truth to it. Google is fully HTTPS-- how could your searches be monitored unless google was handing them over to the government? They could be monitored if the government had surreptitiously gained access to Google servers or internal data transfers by compromising infrastructure such as Google's datacenter-to-datacenter links. I use that exampl…
The name of that program was MUSCULAR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUSCULAR_%28surveillance_progr... That was the famous slide that showed where Google took off SSL with a little smiley face--which reportedly caused Google engineers to "explode with profanity." The NSA actually did not do the actual hacking. The British GCHQ did, with technical assistance from the NSA. Thus the NSA could pretend that since the GCHQ…
That should make anyone explode with profanity