{"id":181489,"date":"2016-06-10T19:53:00","date_gmt":"2016-06-11T00:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/06\/10\/your-daily-guck-foogle\/"},"modified":"2016-06-10T19:53:00","modified_gmt":"2016-06-11T00:53:00","slug":"your-daily-guck-foogle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/06\/10\/your-daily-guck-foogle\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Daily Guck Foogle"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve just discovered a web site that monkey wrenches your Google search history<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Seeing as Google<\/strike> Alphabet has gone full Monty privacy invading evil, I recommend this service, particularly since it is a bit of a screw you to the NSA as well:<\/p>\n

Unless you\u2019ve specifically told it not to, Google remembers everything you\u2019ve ever searched for<\/a>\u2014a fact that\u2019s been useful for artists, Google\u2019s bottom line, law enforcement investigations, among many other things. We\u2019ve all searched for stuff we probably shouldn\u2019t have from time to time, but a web developer has decided to take the shared experience of regretting a specific search to its logical extreme.<\/span>

<\/span>\u201cRuin My Search History<\/a>\u201d promises to \u201cruin your Google search history with a single click,\u201d and that\u2019s exactly what it does. Click on the magnifying glass and it\u2019ll take over your browser and immediately cycles through a series of search terms ranging from the mildly embarrassing (\u201cwhy doesn\u2019t my poo float,\u201d \u201csmelly penis cure urgent\u201d) to the potentially relationship-ruining (\u201cmail order paternity test,\u201d \u201cattracted to mother why\u201d) to the type of thing that might get your name on a list somewhere (\u201cisis application form,\u201d \u201ccheap syria flights,\u201d \u201chow to kill someone hypothetically\u201d). <\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>\u201cI [Jon, the guy who authored the site] thought better of that and went down the route of things you’d hate for people to see in your search history,\u201d he said. \u201cI tried to make a semi-story out of the searches to add to the horror. And added in the person’s location to the queries (though people don’t seem to have noticed that).\u201d <\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>\u201cReally not sure how I came up with the idea originally,\u201d Jon wrote. \u201cIt was probably sparked by the never ending surveillance saga in the news: Snowden, NSA, phone taps, metadata, who searches for what.\u201d I asked Jon if he thought there\u2019s something to the idea that if we all search for words that are likely to be on a watchlist somewhere, we can confuse the NSA<\/a> or make a comment about mass surveillance. <\/span>

<\/span>\u201cI had the idea that the best way to make the government\u2019s search surveillance useless is for us all to be on \u2018the list,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cMaybe it does a bit, but if that’s enough to throw their surveillance off course, it’s probably not great surveillance.\u201d <\/span>

<\/span>After it was posted, the website quickly went to the top of Reddit\u2019s \/r\/internetisbeautiful, where people immediately began to freak the f%$# out<\/a> over the inclusion of ISIS-related search terms. The reaction has been so visceral, in fact, that one of the moderators has had to step in and defend leaving the link to the site\u2014which now has warnings all over it\u2014on the page: \u201cWe’ve taken adequate steps to warn redditors that this link might be something you shouldn’t just blindly click,\u201d internetisbeautiful moderator K_Lobstah wrote in an incredibly long post. \u201cI promise the NSA is not going to black bag you in your sleep (unless you are a terrorist). I promise the police are not calling a judge off his poker game tonight to obtain an emergency search warrant for your apartment.\u201d <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s mostly harmless, but one warning:  one search term is “Donald Trump”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve just discovered a web site that monkey wrenches your Google search history. Seeing as Google Alphabet has gone full Monty privacy invading evil, I recommend this service, particularly since it is a bit of a screw you to the NSA as well: Unless you\u2019ve specifically told it not to, Google remembers everything you\u2019ve ever …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[997,1066,1015],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet","category-privacy","category-weird"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181489"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181489\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}