Filed under: Internet, Security, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Web services, Mozilla, Open Source, Browser Tips, Unix
TrackMeNot search history obfuscator
by Jay Savage Aug 21st 2006 at 6:10PM
TrackMeNot is a Firefox extension designed by two NYU computer science researchers to run in the background and periodically send search requests to popular search engines and portals like AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN. Why would you want to do that? A couple of reasons. First, just for the fun of screwing with their heads. More importantly, though, when the companies release their search records to the public, it will be more difficult for anyone who's interested to figure out who you are from you search patterns.At least that's the theory. The current version apparently doesn't draw from a large enough base of terms or combine them intelligently enough to truly obfuscate search histories--it's possible for a person to figure out which searches are from TrackMeNot and ignore them--but it's a neat idea, and future releases should provide some real security and anonymity. In the mean time, go ahead and install it. It may not protect you from a tenacious sleuth, but the bogus searches should make life interesting for the companies' profiling algorithms and eat up a little bandwidth. Who knows? Maybe it will make life just uncomfortable enough to convince an ISP or two that storing user data is a bad idea.
[via BoingBoing]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Gardiner Westbound said 7:09PM on 8-21-2006
Ingenious! Anything that screws with Big Brother's head is OK by me.
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soub said 10:08PM on 8-21-2006
It does not seem to be effective because people are used to look for something recurrently, following some patterns. Just adding more random searches it is not enough. You could become hidden if the amount of random searches coming from you were very very big and not so random. Random searches seem to be easy to filter. It would be better to "share" your searches with people not related to you from different countries and ages and run these searches periodically like in a public computer. The best way to implement that is using a kind of big proxy (obviously). Another more complex way would be a p2p software to make the searches from different machines and in different search engines before combine the results.
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Sergio said 8:10AM on 8-22-2006
If we all start getting paranoid about search history, if we start using this type of obfuscation, what will happen is that the search engines will render out of target and useless. I don't think we will benefit from that. As much as I'm concerned with third parties storing my footprints, I have to believe it's for building a better product (and a better business, of course.)
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