Firefox Plugin to Foil Google Interest-based Advertising
As I wrote in Big Brother Google Is Watching Me, Google’s new interest-based advertising is pretty freaky. So, I thought that I would help everyone out by sharing this Firefox plugin that may help.
TrackMeNot is designed to perform random search engine searches to as to hide your actual searches in a sea of unrelated searches. The idea is to make your search patterns undetectable and, this, Google can not create an accurate search profile on you.
Here is what the website says:
TrackMeNot is a lightweight browser extension that helps protect web searchers from surveillance and data-profiling by search engines. It does so not by means of concealment or encryption (i.e. covering one’s tracks), but instead, paradoxically, by the opposite strategy: noise and obfuscation. With TrackMeNot, actual web searches, lost in a cloud of false leads, are essentially hidden in plain view. User-installed TrackMeNot works with the Firefox Browser and popular search engines (AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN) and requires no 3rd-party servers or services.
I’m going to give this a try. The hard part will be determining whether or not is is actually successful in covering my tracks.
2 Responses to “Firefox Plugin to Foil Google Interest-based Advertising”
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jambarama Says:
March 16th, 2009 at 8:45 amBad news, trackmenot is a dumb idea.
One, it doesn’t hide your searches. If the government wants to know who’s been searching on “al Qaeda recruitment centers,” it won’t matter that you’ve made ten thousand other searches as well — you’ll be targeted.
Two, it’s too easy to spot. . . .
Three, some of the program’s searches are worse than yours. . . . Does anyone really think that searches on “erotic rape,” “mailbombing bibles,” and “choking virgins” will make their legitimate searches less noteworthy?
And four, it wastes a whole lot of bandwidth. . . . we’re talking 60 megabytes of additional traffic daily. Imagine if everyone in the company used it.
I suppose this kind of thing would stop someone who has a paper printout of your searches and is looking through them manually, but it’s not going to hamper computer analysis very much. Or anyone who isn’t lazy. But it wouldn’t be hard for a computer profiling program to ignore these searches.
If you want to avoid being tracked, use blackboxsearch or TOR. This extension will attract attention, won’t hide legitimate searches from google, and will subject you to much worse targeted ads (rather than lolcats & video games, you’ll get ads for gags & chloroform).
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blackdenim Says:
March 16th, 2009 at 8:56 pmFirefox add-on CustomizeGoogle (google it
will anonymize your Google tracking UID and will also block sending any cookies to Google Analytics. Combine that with TorButton (another add-on) and you’ll be safe.
