Evidence that Google passes search and client information to spammers

One of the web sites that my company hosts has a somewhat vulnerable captcha. It can be bypassed by some spammers, and their emails reach the admins. They approached me for hardening their captcha, and I became aware of the kind of spam that they receive. They also authorized me to mention it in this post.

By way of their normal business activity, their employees perform searches for keywords, on Google. They do not use Bing or any other search engine. After running certain searches, they receive spam emails that contain search terms very similar to those that they use. I consider it evidence of a leak from Google, and here is why.

This client of mine is also my VPN client. The IP address of their web site matches the external IP address of their internet connection. Since they use Google over SSL, and its certificate appears in their browser, their SSL connection to Google is not compromised. This means that information about both their searches and their IP address can only be obtained by spammers from Google itself.

If Google is willing to provide any feedback on this matter, I will allow them to comment on this post.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 10:42 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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