wifi providers changing search settings

Hello everyone,

I’m sitting in the local Target parking lot while my wife is shopping. I’ve had enough of shopping today and decided to wait in the car. I’ve got my tablet with me so I decided to do a little Web surfing using Target’s wifi. I went to google to look up something and noticed my safe search setting was on the most restrictive one. I thought this was odd since I never have the filter set to anything but off, so I went to the settings, changed it to off, went to do my search again and there it was on the strict setting again. I tried Bing and same deal.

I get they are blocking people from looking at porn while in their store (which I wasn’t doing. I like porn as much as the next guy/gal, but not in public). However, I found it strange that they are able to alter your search settings. They are doing this and my browser isn’t playing games with me, right?

Yes, they can doing that. I’m one of the tech people at a small school district. The web filter we currently use and the one we had before have the ability to force safe search mode. Before we got a filter with that capability we had to block image searches.

Genius! Defeating porn with the users own browser. I’m quite impressed.

Is this a permanent change? What other browser settings can they change?

But is this a browser settings change or a Google (website) settings change?

It’s a “way that your network architecture is configured to handle Google searches” change.

Straight from the source:

Neither; it’s just simple URL rewriting. Whenever the router sees a URL that looks like a Google or Bing search URL, it adds the parameter to turn safe mode on. The URL param overrides the Google account setting (specifically to make this possible, in fact), but your account setting hasn’t changed.

Once you leave the Target parking lot and connect to another wifi network, your tablet will search like it did before.

How does this work if people use https when connecting to google? When I connect to www.google.com it is an encrypted session. The proxy should not be able to know what I am sending to google and if it chould it should not be able to change the data from my browser to google. Are they disallowing encrypted traffic to google so it defaults to an unencrypted connection?

That’s a good question. I wager it doesn’t work, but I don’t know.

From the same link I posted above:

[quote]

SSL Search options

When searching over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), the connection between the user and Google is encrypted. Because the connection is encrypted, the query rewriting techniques described in the Enforce SafeSearch section will not work. As a workaround, you may disable SSL using our No-SSL option (described in greater detail below). Note: SafeSearch Lock works with SSL and doesn’t require the No-SSL option to function.
If the scenario described above is problematic for your school, Google provides a NoSSLSearch option. The network administrator can adjust the DNS configuration for www.google.com to point to our NoSSLSearch end point. For regular http traffic, the user will see no difference.
Blocking access

[ul]
[li]When students search using https://encrypted.google.com, content filtering systems in place on your network may not be able to read their searches or Google’s response. If this is problematic for your school, you can block https://encrypted.google.com. When students continue to search using http://www.google.com, your content filtering will work as it always has in the past.[/li][/ul]

[ul]
[li]Google products may refer to or depend on resources on https://www.google.com. As long as you do not block https://www.google.com, your organization should still be able to access all of these services.[/li][/quote]

[/ul]