Jon says it’s gotten out of hand. “The reaction on Reddit has been mental, some people seem to be legitimately freaking out,” he said. “I guess that's just the sad times we live in. We assume the feds will turn up and that we're actually guilty because we typed some words into the internet.” Is it really that unreasonable to think that searching for something on the internet might bring you undue attention? I'm thinking that his website is keeping stats on who presses the button. He says that he knows how many people visited and pressed the button and those who didn't, and now he knows who has corrupted search terms attached to their IP address.After it was posted, the website quickly went to the top of Reddit’s /r/internetisbeautiful, where people immediately began to freak the fuck out 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—which now has warnings all over it—on the page: “We've taken adequate steps to warn redditors that this link might be something you shouldn't just blindly click,” internetisbeautiful moderator K_Lobstah wrote in an incredibly long post. “I 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.”
It's not unreasonable, but you shouldn't worry about it. Basically every site you visit (excluding Hubski) logs your IP address and all behavior they can possible glean. Your IP address and visit is then sold to third parties that match it with your activity on other sites and build a profile. If you aren't obscuring your behavior actively this is already happening to you. Also, what does it mean if you click that link? Not much, really.
Also, I think I heard it on here actually, that government agencies are collecting so much data it almost bogs them down. Chances are they won't notice you, and even if they did, I think they could tell the difference between a one time click and an actual trend in behavior. At least, I hope they can tell.
And I hope they can tell when many users add the same searches around the same time to exclude trends that may be due to something other than interest in the search results. Trends like a link being posted across social media.
This is more of my point. I don't think that authorities will show up at your door for making random searches. But if someone wants to mess with you and knows you did this, you have a bit more explaining to do than if you hadn't. Any cast of suspicion is another obstacle you'd have to overcome to have people dismiss the claim, regardless of how unwarranted the claim may seem.
That's kind of scary. Auto-censure happen when you feel you are in a surveillance state. If people freak out having "Isis" attached to their search, they already lost any hope to be in a democratic state. The point being of course, if X million people search for isis, pedophilia, and penis enlargement device, all those searches become meaningless. Or at least need double checking to get something out of it.