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by nullc 1778 days ago
I noticed google doing this too while trying to look up case law related to the discussion of apple's spyware. Related google searches popped up a big intimidating notice: "WARNING Child sexual abuse imagery is illegal".

The obvious implication is that your searches are being reported to some unaccountable authority.

I have no doubt that this creates a chilling effect against public discussion about these practices.

3 comments

Lol. I've gotten these many times. It turns out that an acronym related to my work is one typo away from a listed child porn term/site. If google is reporting these then I am already on thier list.
In particle physics, it is interesting which fundamental interactions conserve parity, charge parity and time reversion. Interactions that do not conserve one or multiple parties are called "parity violating". In this context, in some interactions combined charge and parity conservation is violated, which is unfortunately named CP violation.
Better not look up anything about /usr/bin/cp.

For the Hugin panarama suite one tool to find control points is named cpfind.

Civil Protections in Half-Life 2 is also often abbreviated CP. IIRC the are even CP violations mentioned in the Overwatch announcements, which would fit in with the series' physics references.

So many minefields...

Or look up how to handle kill process or sacrifice child.
> It turns out that an acronym related to my work is one typo away

Ah that old chestnut, I am sure they have heard many worse excuses than that one.

There is an old Drew Carry joke:

"I wanted to get the Playboy channel, but I already have the cartoon network and if you have both they put you on a special list."

The warning suggests that your search might return child sexual abuse imagery, which is odd.

If Google was doing its job, no search results would contain CP and they wouldn’t need to warn anyone. They probably shouldn’t warn anyone since all it does is alert people who might be looking for CP that they are being watched, and scares anyone who isn’t looking but their search terms have similar words.

The outcome is overall worse than if no alert popped up.

You used to get that when searching for PDO (PHP Data Objects) documentation on Google. I think it got fixed some time in 2019 though.