Today was among the few times I pissed off the general public. Essentially, I modified a filesharing client to log all incoming searches.
Over time, I had a large log of data about what people are searching for. People were blissfully unaware about how their privacy was violated when they searched on filesharing client.
After logging searches for a week, I spent an hour writing python scripts and a django application, which checks the intranet IP of the visitor and displays all the terms he/she’d searched for, and displayed it on a html page.
Rest assured, people were pissed. Really pissed.
Mainly because most of the searches were for objectionable content, and to have your obscene searches staring you in the face is really freaky, or so they say.
At the end it was a brilliant project. A very small, but extremely powerful and dangerous webpage, exposing just how ridiculously poor their knowledge of privacy is.
I pulled the page down, and removed the indexes and logs. I do not wish to possess such power. Moreover, I’m not the voyeur type. I don’t like to go and see what people are searching for.
In the long term perhaps, it’ll evolve into something like Google Trends, where I can see search volume and graph it to get insight about the people in the institute. I keep realizing the incredible power of Python and the Django framework, which I used to write the application.
Because I watched half an hour of “The dark knight” before I worked on this, I started realizing the burden of being able to do something and not being able to show the world.
I need to get some sleep :\
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