Goolag Smart Search Super Stupid

For folks that haven't yet moved to an alternative to Goolag for search, here's another reason to ditch it. Today Proton Mail, an anyonymous email service that doesn't KYC (and also offers a great free VPN, and a bunch of other free services), posted the following on Mastodon.

IMG source - Mastodon.social

So Smart Search from Goolag is on by default, and scans your device for whatever you enter into the search box on the Goolag search engine. Lord only knows what else they scan your device for, but it's a pretty feeble reason to scan your device when you're asking Goolag where to find something. If you had that information on your device, why would you be asking Goolag for it?

Since you give them permission, they aren't 'invading' your privacy - and they can do whatever they want with whatever they find on your device, including giving it to police, who can also do whatever they want with it legally, since you gave permission to Goolag to discover it on your device, so the cops aren't lacking a warrant for the search of your device, since they didn't search it, Goolag did.

Some years ago I did all I could to eliminate any information Goolag had on me, deleting all the searches I had made on it before I learned the phrase 'Don't Be Evil' actually meant 'Be As Evil As Possible' to the creepy stalking company. I doubt I actually removed anything from Goolags files, but I did make every effort to do so, and they can never say I didn't and intended them to have any information they retained. I dunno if there's a statute of limitations on Warez and cracks, but back in the day I was very interested in how those things were done, so I may have searched for things like that for educational purposes.

I really advise folks needing to search for things online to use some other service that doesn't search your device every time you run a search on the internet. That's just creepy, and like Proton Mail says, it could ruin your life.

Edit: just found this bonus from Goolag, if you recently search for Keepass, they put a malware spoof site at the top of their rankings because the criminals paid them to. Thanks to Brian Krebs for the heads up.

IMG source - Mastodon.social