Comments on: TrackMeNot Helps Preserve Your Search Privacy

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 05:58:10 +0000

Using search proxies is a good step. You get the convenience of google without the problems.

[blackboxsearch.com]

also someone made a plugin that puts it in your firefox search box

you can get it here

[connorboyack.com]

By: Inferno_str1ke

Inferno_str1ke — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 15:10:52 +0000

To be honest I doubt people would ever want to hide things from Google in the first place – they proved with the DoJ case a while ago that they don’t like handing out data, whereas MSN and Yahoo complied instantly. And AOL are just total fools.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 13:27:10 +0000

It also messes up your Google Search History which stores my search queries for me. I know I know, I am giving them permission to store my searches but it is extremely useful to me. When I can’t find that site that I know I searched for last week it will let me search my history. It has saved me a lot of time.

By: Inferno_str1ke

Inferno_str1ke — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 10:28:00 +0000

Whilst this is a good idea it would mean that those nice things such as the Google Trends service become useless. A better option if you are a Google user would be to download the CustomizeGoogle extension, which allows many things including encryption of your Google cookie, removal of click tracking and options to block certain sites. Incidentally you're correct in the way it works Ryan, most search engines use the $_GET variables, and if it put all these queries into a single URL your search would find nothing.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 00:13:47 +0000

From what I gathered on how it works is that it will submit a bunch of queries to the search engine that you are on. That way when you actually submit your own query it will be mixed in with all of the fake queries. So it doesn’t actually hide your query it just makes it difficult to identify which ones you actually performed yourself and which ones the extension did.

If I am understanding the extension wrong please let me know.

By: OldManDeath

OldManDeath — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 00:05:57 +0000

So does this just wrap fake searh terms around your actual search term? Or does it scramble it?

By: Ryan

Ryan — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 21:59:03 +0000

I was having fun looking at what it generated as well. If you want some more security tools we recently listed 10 great Firefox extensions that would keep your information more secure.

By: Alfredo

Alfredo — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 21:52:17 +0000

I have installed this extension and it’s interesting to see the fake random search strings it produces: “betas nerds”, “cat faradizes”, “glasses puffs”, “texts”, “ipod natures foregrounds”, “spangle”, “Hollywood”, “nude SOS”, “bauds model”, “posted”, “Robert oppenheimer scags”, etc, etc…
After the AOL incident this kind of tools are more and more important each day.