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Ask HN: Did anyone use ruinmysearchhistory and get Google account suspended today?
Today my google account was suspended for ToS violation. I think it might have something to do with the "ruin my search history" viral thing yesterday.
Did anyone else who participated in that have their account suspended today?
(Talking about this -- do not open link if you do not want to literally ruin your search history: ruinmysearchhistory.com)
- xupybd 10y agoI ran it, no google ban
- ignorantguy 10y agoI ran it at work. Please don't do that :)
- joshmanders 10y agoSame, ran twice, no ban.
- alexanderson 10y agoI ran it using private Safari mode (akin to Incognito in Chrome). There were naturally no consequences to my Google Account, nor my IP Address.
- JJJollyjim 10y agoPrivate mode doesn't run a VPN, right? So your IP address is still associated with the searches.
- branchless 10y agoExactly, surely they are cross referencing your browser making requests with your IP one second, your "anonymous" mode the next then another sync with gmail from your gmail page. And I'd bet that is far less sophisticated than it gets.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- balls187 10y ago> I ran it using private Safari mode ... There were naturally no consequences to my ... IP Address. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46Kv4rBJi68 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46Kv4rBJi68
- curiousgal 10y agoAs 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.
- edgarvaldes 10y agoThe name of the site is pretty clear.
- LaMarseillaise 10y agoNot really... I actually rather expected it to be an article like just about anything else here. It was not labeled "Show HN" or anything, and apparently only required opening the link (I did not open it myself). Edit: I guess I was misinformed about this last - micaeked says that you have to click a button on the page.
- bbcbasic 10y agoGo on! Blame that victim. Edit: please don't let the down voters win.
- myaccountzz 10y ago"victim"
- 10y ago
- rythmshifter 10y agoran twice, at work, signed into my google account. no ban.
- nefitty 10y agoWow, really sorry to hear that happened! I would be in a panic if that happened to me. I feel like that site could have been used for good, to maybe scramble user profiles. As another user commented here, the terrorist search terms seem like a really unnecessarily extreme joke. Do you think you were suspended because of the high volume of automated searches or would it have something to do with the actual content?
- WhatIsThisIm12 10y agoSidenote since this is getting so much attention: How does the website control the URL of an external tab? Is this effectively tabnabbing?
- fennecfoxen 10y agohttps://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/open https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/open
- voiceclonr 10y agoThat was a terrible one. I wish I hadn't clicked it.
- monokrome 10y agoSame here. WTF did I do?!
- aerovistae 10y agoI'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 to make a bomb," "bomb materials," "where to buy guns," etc will get you put on a government watchlist. 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?
- nefitty 10y agoWell, Google does have a team that monitors the dark side of what passes through it. This article is from 2012, so I'm sure their capability has stepped up significantly since then. https://www.buzzfeed.com/reyhan/tech-confessional-the-googler-who-looks-at-the-wo https://www.buzzfeed.com/reyhan/tech-confessional-the-google...
- dragonwriter 10y ago> 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 example because I recall a leak (IIRC, either as part of or contemporaneous to early rounds of the Snowden leaks) that the NSA had done exactly that with unencrypted inter-data-center links of Google and other entities with multiple datacenters, and reports shortly after that that Google and several others had taken action to secure and encrypt those links afterwards.
- snowwrestler 10y agoThe name of that program was MUSCULAR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUSCULAR_%28surveillance_program%29 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 collected all the information, it was foreign-sourced and therefore not subject to FISA court jurisdiction.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- s_m 10y agoI went to that site and my Google account was not suspended.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nathangrant 10y agoPoked through the JS to find the list of search terms since I didn't want to ruin my search history, silly list. The last one was a funny easter egg "OH COME ON DONT JUST COPY AND PASTE THE LIST FROM THE ARRAY YOU CHEEKY SCAMP"
- tuna-piano 10y agoI 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.
- themartorana 10y agoCould 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 government surveiling us. I worry they'll attempt put a stop to that too eventually.
- asuffield 10y ago(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 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 permission in advance from Google." Intentionally using a tool to send automated search queries is pretty clearly prohibited.
- alblue 10y agoWhat about if they were not performing the searches intentionally? What prevents someone paying to serve an advert that does exactly the same thing?
- tmpanon1234act 10y agoThis whole incident has convinced me to actually use a tool like this, so I'm going to write one and distribute the extension code for free. I promise you won't be able to detect it, so good luck. I think anyone who wants the ability to obscure their search footprint should have it. And if you think otherwise, I'm doubly convinced it's necessary.
- nickysielicki 10y agoRecently (maybe the past ~6mo or so) I've noticed that when I start pasting logs/errors/tcpdump into Google, it is now especially suspicious that I'm making automated queries and makes my IP solve a captcha. I doubt my lack of a Google login and random UA spoofing does anything to help this, though.
- AYBABTME 10y agoThe kind of stuff you can afford to do only when you're a US citizen and thus not a potential victim of some arbitrary US custom officer deciding you can't come in anymore and have no appeal. What I'm saying is, if you're not a US citizen, don't participate in those kinds of actions. The problems these campaigns highlight are real, but being foreigners, we have no legal recourses in the US in many areas, and can end up seriously fucking up our lives. Also it'd be nice if US folks sharing those links and encouraging actions of the kind could be considerate of non-US people who don't necessarily have the leisure of getting on all kinds of list.
- dwaltrip 10y agoIt amazes me that that we have reached this point.
- mcjiggerlog 10y agoWell this is a weirdly US-centric view.. You seem to assume that all people not living in the US are actually just waiting to emigrate their. I'm quite happy in Spain, thanks!
- AYBABTME 10y agoIt's not about emigrating there, it's about merely being able to go. And in tech, being unable to enter the US is a hurdle.
- NetStrikeForce 10y agoI actually have a trip planned to the US soon and I wouldn't dare clicking on that link, just because of that...
- carc1n0gen 10y agoI just ruined my search history so let's see if I get my account suspended.
- egberts5 10y agoFascinating... Well, apparently, excessive use of the Google with nonsensical queries should be a violation of any sane ToS agreement. Ran it, wasn't too impress with the 'choices of words' being used for the Google searches, so I stopped it.
- tehrei 10y agoPlay stupid games, win stupid prizes as the saying goes... On the other hand, this should be just a silly thing with no real consequences.
- mirimir 10y agoSo has it been restored yet? You'd think that someone reading this topic could get that cleared up pretty quickly.
- orik 10y agohere's to hoping mine doesnt get banned. i've been planning on switching off of google products soon, towards fastmail, but haven't gotten the right domain name yet.
- kinkdr 10y agoWow! It really saddens me that our world has gotten to a point where people are scarred, justifiably, for the consequences of clicking on a website link.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- MTemer 10y agoI'm curious, what if something like this was distributed as malware or viral links (the new rick and roll), would it get a lot of people banned? Would it work as a global privacy tool?
- greggman 10y agoOh, oh,. So some troll will now add an invisible iframe to ruinmysearchhistory.com on some other popular site just for the lulz
- monokrome 10y agoI doubt it? The site still requires you to click a button (which would be inside the iframe) before it will search for you. Also, are iframes able to use `window.open`?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- 0x54MUR41 10y agoI ran it yesterday and I open my Google account today. It's not suspended. It probably I ran it without signing in Google.
- borschelrh 10y agoMe too. But, I have my DNS obscured using Express VPN.
- borschelrh 10y agoMe too. But, I have my DNS obscured using Express VPN.
- rampole 10y agoI haven't clicked it as my usual Chrome user because I find my search history useful for recalling results. I did open it in an incognito window and saw what it does. It doesn't look like a big deal. It's probably the web-era version of sticking red-alert keywords in your Usenet signatures back in the 80's and 90's.
- poohtay10 10y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11880008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11880008 has no effect with iPhone 6 9.3 version