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.<p>Did anyone else who participated in that have their account suspended today?<p>(Talking about this -- do not open link if you do not want to literally ruin your search history: ruinmysearchhistory.com)
I find the serious conversations that came from this funny, seemingly silly project very interesting.<p>1- The chilling effect of people being scared to click on a link that may do searches their government cares about<p>2- The idea that if many people used a browser add in like this, it would make surveillance of search history much more difficult<p>3- Google accounts getting banned<p>All from one silly site.
I'm curious: does anyone know whether Google searches are truly monitored, and how, if it's HTTPS?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?
The 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.<p>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.<p>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.
As 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.<p>I still don't get why something so malicious was upvoted so much.
Wow, 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?
Wow! 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.
I haven't clicked it as my usual Chrome user because I find my search history useful for recalling results.<p>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.
Poked 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"
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11880008" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11880008</a>
has no effect with iPhone 6 9.3 version
I'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?
Fascinating... Well, apparently, excessive use of the Google with nonsensical queries should be a violation of any sane ToS agreement.<p>Ran it, wasn't too impress with the 'choices of words' being used for the Google searches, so I stopped it.
here's to hoping mine doesnt get banned.<p>i've been planning on switching off of google products soon, towards fastmail, but haven't gotten the right domain name yet.
Recently (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.<p>I doubt my lack of a Google login and random UA spoofing does anything to help this, though.