Copy-Pasting Google Search URLs Leaks Previous Searches

  • 29 October 2015
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By Catalin Cimpanu    29 Oct 2015
 

Issue seems to be fixed, only affected Chrome and Firefox

 
                                      http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/fitted/340x180/copy-pasting-google-search-urls-leaks-previous-searches.jpg
 
An MIT researcher has uncovered a privacy hole in Google's search engine, one that inadvertently leaks a user's previous search query if he copy-pastes his current search results URL and shares it with someone else.
 
The one that came across over this issue is Jeremy Rubin, founder of Tidbit, technical director at the MIT Bitcoin Project, and founder and senior technical advisor for the Digital Currency Initiative @ MIT Media Lab.
 
Mr. Rubin first noticed something wrong when he received a copy-pasted Google search URL from one of his friends. The URL in question had the following pattern:
https://www.google.com/search?q=first+search&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=second+search
 
Apparently, Google was storing the last two search queries in the parameters shown in the user's browser.
 
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I'm sure Google is aware of this flaw and will correct it asap

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