What would happen if Google and other search engines were hacked?

To be honest, if Google was hacked and millions of peoples search requests were in the hands of people that could put every person searches into a searchable site, it would be terrorism that would touch people on a personal level.

I do think this will happen. Also ISP's getting hacked and having a database of every site everyone has visited would also be devastating. I think this will happen some day.

The amount of depression, suicide, homicide, ruining of lives would far outweigh any terrorist attack you could think of

quote:

---

What would happen if Google and other search engines were hacked?

---

Why would they need to be hacked? Packets are collected and warehoused. Snowden bro.

I guess you mean a free hack where everyone gets a glimpse before servers are shut down. I'm sure there's a DR contingency for that.

What people need to really worry about is having all of their "private" data sitting in some "cloud" that they don't control. Makes for good sync between devices, but if the cloud gets hacked - everything up there is free game. And they'll be quiet about it until they have it all.

quote:

---

NSA being hacked for their data is less probable than a private company.

---

Again... Why would they need to be hacked?

This information being in the NSA's hands is bad enough.

If there were one massive leak where everyone could see anyone's data, that might be a much bigger single event, but the overall impact would not actually be as bad, IMO.

Everyone getting exposed simultaneously would allow us to all see the skeletons in each others' closets, but I think we'd quickly get over all the dick pics and the realization that everyone seems to be into some kinky shite.

On the other hand, giving all this power to one single entity means everything remains a secret but people can be singled out, ridiculed, or blackmailed by the entity holding those secrets, for whatever reason that entity feels like. The fact that that entity is the government is even worse.

I'm not saying Google is unhackable, but they consider all that personal data to be one of their main assets, they build their own infrastructure, computers, and OS. If any private company is going to keep that data safe it will be Google.

That being said it only takes one chink in the armor or disgruntled employee in the right position to make your fears come true, so the only real answer if you are concerned with this is to protect yourself. Make it harder for "them" to get a complete picture of you by using multiple services for things and don't tie into one service/ecosystem. Also use VPNs and secure search engines like startpage.com and duckduckgo.com

quote:

---

Could we at some point be faced with a scenario where our names are tied with our internet traffic and thus if hacked could be searchable for anyone?

---

A breach like you're talking about where EVERYONE is exposed I think would lead to a nuclear response and wouldn't stay "publicly" available for too long. If you were important enough to have enemies sure they could get at it, but friends, family and employers would have to jump through quite a few hoops on the dark side of the net to get at it.

quote:

---

Many smarter people use a VPN, but even those are vulnerable.

---

I trust ISP firewalls tremendously more than most of the VPN groups out there. The majority of people using them are just covering tracks from their ISP.

Does whoever is providing these IPs not keep a log of who they're assigning them to? I would imagine that they do and picture it tucked neatly inside their own network.

Then my point is pretty pointless, assuming they are telling the truth.

quote:

---

Everyone getting exposed simultaneously would allow us to all see the skeletons in each others' closets, but I think we'd quickly get over all the dick pics and the realization that everyone seems to be into some kinky shite.

---

Plus any one person would be a needle in a haystack.

I'm not sure how you would tie searches to a specific person anyway. Anyone doing an "embarrassing" search is going to look for an unsecured wifi if they're that worried about it. A lot of searches are done without logging in and are done on shared computers. Then you'd have searches where people were looking something up for business instead of personal reasons and that would further muddle the information you'd know from a search history (of course, most of those aren't particularly interesting anyway.)