National Firearm serial number search on Facebook and Google

[Dungannon]

NOTICE: Facebook And Google Indexing Your Firearm Serial Numbers

Google and Facebook have now made it possible to find photos of firearms by simply searching for a serial number. A story today showed that photos of cars could be found by searching for license plate numbers. It appears the same is now also true of firearm serial numbers.

www.thefirearmblog.com

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[ACO]

Plot twist: they just want you to type them into the search so they can document what you have.

 

[Caveman Jim]

Plot twist: they just want you to type them into the search so they can document what you have.

Exactly. DON'T DO IT FOLKS!!!!

 

[Mica]

I could honestly say, I can't think of one good reason a person would want to do that.

 

[s1xty7]

Use DuckDuckGo.com instead. Google results without the logging. At least you could see if the content was there. Do it through a VPN in a private browser window if you want to skip the IP tracking and some of the local logging. You could be more careful about it, but it starts to get a little weird.

Edit: I could not duplicate the results with DuckDuckGo so it may not work to verify. Still good practice to avoid some of the Google spying.

 

[papersoldier]

It always makes me grimace a little whenever I see people posting pictures of their guns online without first editing out the serial number.

 

[DB is Here]

Who's paranoid...everyone is out to get us.

 

[Medic!]

I grimace in general.

 

[scarlo]

Maybe the sophisticated could photo shop bogus serial numbers on their postings...

 

[Member 34319]

So your saying I should start typing in a bunch of bogus serial numbers?

 

[L84Cabo]

FYI...

NOTICE: Facebook And Google Indexing Your Firearm Serial Numbers

Google and Facebook have now made it possible to find photos of firearms by simply searching for a serial number. A story today showed that photos of cars could be found by searching for license plate numbers. It appears the same is now also true of firearm serial numbers.

www.thefirearmblog.com

Google and Facebook have now made it possible to find photos of firearms by simply typing a serial number into the search box. Earlier today, the automotive website Jalopnik published a story showing how license plate numbers are evidently scanned using optical character recognition (OCR) on Google images, allowing them to be searchable using text queries. Using the OCR hypothesis, TFB wondered if this image data mining technique might be able to be used to search for firearm serial numbers. Using images posted previously on TFB with serial numbers displayed on firearms, we tested the serial number search technique. As you can see from the results below, firearm serial numbers are in fact part of this apparent large-scale data mining operation by companies like Google and Facebook.

 

[Zathras]

One of the better comments in the article:

"Off to order a lower with a serial # that does SQL injection.
-It won't get Google or FB but it'll wreck somebody using the data. "

 

[awshoot]

Use DuckDuckGo.com instead. ...

I switched to DDG several years ago. I have no problem finding anything I want with it. Aside from habit, there is no reason to subject yourself to BigTech monitoring like Google.

 

[Makers Mark]

I guess I should be surprised, but I'm not.
I do have a few firearm pictures on our paid drop box account but for all I know google and company may own drop box. Or drop box may not be as 'secure' as they claim to be.

 

[clearconscience]

They have other ways to track it via your account, internet, phones.

I have no idea why any one would post their guns on FB or the like,

but sadly most of us have here and it's all in the govt's info bank now.

we've gotten to a point where we played right into the tyrannical govt's hand.
people live their lives online now. Secrets don't exist. Other than those of political elites

 

[Tony617]

I suggest you be careful in posting pictures of your firearms to be sure you obscure the serial numbers...

Backdoor Gun Registry on Google from Data Mining? ⋆ Conservative Firing Line