Online privacy (& protection from Google)

[Steph]

A little while ago Canuck suggested Do Not Track Plus by Abine, a really great little program to help protect privacy online. A great anti tracking program I've barely been online during the last 4 months and yet in that time it's blocked over 50,000 tracking attempts!

The same company has just released "Googlesharing" Protected Search, an add-on that make things as difficult as possible for Google (who track and store every online search you make to create a common profile about you) while at the same time keeping the search engine happy and fully-functioning as usual. It works by issuing users with temporary new identities and changes them at random. It uses a custom proxy and a Firefox add-on that hides your location and protects your identity. The proxy works by generating a pool of 'identities', each of which contains a cookie issued by Google. The Firefox add-on watches for requests to Google and transparently redirects them to the proxy. There, requests are stripped of all identifying information and replaced with the information from one of the random pool 'identities'.

Note that it's currently in beta and only operational at the moment for Firefox although versions for other browsers are being developed. I haven't downloaded it myself yet as I tend not to use beta programs so can't comment at this stage on how well it's working but it looks promising so if anyone tries it, let us know!

Free download from Keep your searches private with Googlesharing

And if you really want to frighten yourselves and see just why online privacy is so important, take a look at this : Invasion of Privacy. « AttackVector.org

Steph