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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? |
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.