6 ms·
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 frien
by aerovistae 10y ago
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 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.
- Gnarl 10y agoThat should make anyone explode with profanity
- branchless 10y agoI often wonder if I'm going to get arrested searching for the best way to kill a hung child process.
- Klathmon 10y agoOr searching "man cp" instead of typing it in the terminal...
- curiousgal 10y agoSets up a pitchfork
- jrockway 10y agoIt took me a long time to figure out what might be wrong with that. Wow!
- mthoms 10y agoOr 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.
- DanBC 10y agoI 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-dark-web-online-child-abuse-internet https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/18/uk-us-dar...
- shasta 10y agoWell, what did it do when you tried?
- curiousgal 10y agoMost Third World governments control ISPs and DNS queries can be easily monitored but whether those are implicative or not depends on where the content embedded in the search results is hosted/served from. Also, even if Google is fully HTTPS, if a query returns images hosted on unsecured websites, those urls will be plainly visible and hence implicative. Edit: The embedded thumbnails are actually encrypted as pointed by the comment below.
- manufacturious 10y agoI was curious and just checked -- until you click on an image in google's search results to see it fullsize in the semi-lightbox, you're actually getting the "thumbnail" sent from google as a b64 encoded string
- curiousgal 10y agoWell, that's good news. thank you for checking, I stand corrected.
- luke-stanley 10y agoI suspect it might just be represented that way in the browser, and that it's not sent that way.
- manufacturious 10y agoInteresting thought, but wouldn't it kinda have to be done that way? Otherwise you'd see missing images on image SERPs, and you'd see the delay of thumbnails loading due to slower source servers.
- mkj 10y agoBrowsers doing url prefetching for top results would also leak some information?
- mamon 10y agoSo now we consider US to be Third World country? :)
- tn13 10y agoI have assumed that searching things like "How to make a bomb" will bring you on government radar. How government does it does not matter. I will not be surprised if the government has malware infected your computer to occasionally steal your browser history.
- back_beyond 10y agoIn the US, the query "where to buy guns" seems perfectly legitimate.
- gruez 10y agoNot if you also query "How to kill someone hypothetically" shortly before/after.
- back_beyond 10y agoReputable gun shops offer ammunition whose primary selling point is its ability to kill humans. I mention this as a relevant aside: in the US, it is (very possibly) even legitimate to search something like "ammunition best suited to kill someone".
- protomyth 10y agoYep, but I do believe this script does some searches for info on terrorists, and that would be problematic with the search you describe.
- Agathos 10y agoAnd endless arguments about what caliber and kind of round has the best stopping power come up every day on gun forums. It's their vim vs. emacs.
- codezero 10y agoWhat if you're writing a murder mystery novel?
- gumby 10y agoor a filesystem...
- reitanqild 10y agoI guess this refers to Reiser?
- Pica_soO 10y agoGoogle 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.
- PeCaN 10y agoGoogle'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.
- kaerast 10y agoI don't know if it still works, but Google used to support network providers force non-ssl searches using DNS poisoning. BT's WiFi offering used to do this, which is one of the reasons I stopped using it.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y agoGoogle 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.
- mirimir 10y agoWell, they do if you let them. For Mirimir, they have no clue. Just a bunch of blind alleys.
- Daviey 10y agoWhen I was at Google Mountain View in 2009, they had a TV scrolling through current search terms.. Some of them were hilarious...
- asuffield 10y ago(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&ncol=5 https://www.google.com/trends/hottrends/visualize?nrow=5&nco...
- Daviey 10y agoOh 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.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- drpossum 10y agohttps://i.imgur.com/4p9oMTp.jpg https://i.imgur.com/4p9oMTp.jpg