What with Facebook running riot over the Internet, protecting one's privacy is about all that people can think of now. As Google quietly amplifies and expands its data mining efforts over individual users, a new Firefox add-on called GoogleSharing is due out now that aims to help you protect your privacy better when you use Google. GoogleSharing is a simple proxy service that gives Google incorrect information on what IP address you come from, what browser you use and so on. Google has been at pains to try to assure users that it retains as little of your personal information as possible. For instance, the company promises that your IP address will only be retained intact for a certain period of time; after which the company says it will anonymize it. But Google will only do that to the last octet of the IP string after a few months. That doesn't really destroy anything about your IP address that couldn't be rebuilt later. Google has other information from your computer to go on in any rebuilding efforts - cookies, browser data files and such. Google has so much information on you from every search you make that merely destroying one or two pieces of information wouldn't really make you invisible to them. And so enters GoogleSharing. Whenever you need to use a Google service like the search engine that doesn't need you to sign in, the add-on removes the cookie out of the request, it encrypts your search string, and your query is sent to Google through a proxy server.
GoogleSharing will also let you have Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protection on Google services that don't usually come with https security. Once your request is routed to the proxy server, the server there adds to the request a fictitious cookie that Google would consider valid, washes the request's HTTP header, and sends it on to Google. Google's search results come back to you by the same route. If you have certain critical terribly secret projects you're working on, you could get yourself even greater security using industrial-strength proxy servers like The Onion Router. The only problem is, for all the work the onion router puts into it, it really slows things down. For extra security, services like this will even take out the HTTP header altogether; which could trigger Google's alarms for automated searches. It could put out one of those CAPTCHA tests that ask you to read a stylized word or something before it shows you your search results; which would really slow thi ngs down.
For less paranoid identity safe searching, GoogleSharing works wonderfully. Of course you would be giving GoogleSharing the information you're trying to hide from Google, but GoogleSharing doesn't have the resources Google has to make any use of it. And the more people that come to use GoogleSharing's proxies, the more safe you would be in the crowd.
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