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Defeating Google's Perpetual Search Logging
heretic108 writes "Google's policy of storing everyone's search histories forever is causing concern amongst many, especially since Google stores a cookie on everyone's PC expiring in 2038. But at least one user is fighting back. His short and simple guide tells you how to set up any decent web browser so that it routes Google requests through an anonymous proxy, while sending everything else direct to the net for full-speed surfing. Follow these steps and get Google's nose out of your business once and for all."
but still accepts cookies from Google, even if it just for the session.
Besides, not one word about JavaScript......
If you are going to the trouble of setting up a proxy, why not use it for all of your web traffic? I mean, there are websites out there that collect just as much information as Google does, why do you want them collecting information about you?
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Use Customize Google:
Customize Google For Internet Explorer
Customize Google For FireFox
Both will anonymize your google cookie, click tracking and much more.
Both are free open source projects.
Omgili - Find out what people are saying.
No it doesn't. It tells you how to set it up with Firefox and only Firefox via the FoxyProxy extension. That's a far cry from what you're claiming; no instructions for Safari or Opera.
Google are able to also track, log and profile a lot of your browsing activities as they can track at sites which that displays google Adsense ads. By linking your cookie to the contents of the page, they can profile you.
Google is the ultimate Big brother tool isn't it?
I found Outpost firewall to have a function to be able to block browsing for specific URLs. Add a block googlesyndication.com and google adverts will not be displayed on any pages you visit. Google will not be able to know what you are browsing.
Gmail protection...
I also run a autoresponder only sent to gmail users as suggested on URL: http://www.epic.org/privacy/gmail/faq.html
Dear Friend
I have received your e-mail, but due to privacy concerns, I don't want to send my response to your Gmail account. Please give me another e-mail address where I can reach you. If you don't have another e-mail address, consider the following free e-mail accounts with generous storage which do not pose the same privacy risks:
* Rediffmail (1GB + no content extraction)
* Walla (1GB + no content extraction)
* Spymac (1GB + no content extraction)
* Aventure-mail (2GB + no content extraction)
For more information on the privacy risks posed by Gmail, see http://www.epic.org/privacy/gmail/faq.html.
Sincerely,
Concerned Citizen
because you cannot be found guilty of thinking about a crime.
A group in Canada was arrested for thinking about bombing a Hudson tunnel. A group in Miami was arrested for thinking about bombing buildings in Chicago. Not only didn't they have bombs, they didn't have materials or knowledge of how to put one together. They didn't even have money or connections, just that, as sick as they were, they wanted to perform bombings, at the time of the arrests, they simply didn't have any capacity to carry it out. Given that these were effectively pre-crime, it's not much of a leap as you think.
So, instead of sending your search results to Google to be recorded, you're sending them to both Google and some unknown third-party?
Explain to me how giving some stranger all your search results will protect your privacy, Slashdot.
But what about those sites that you don't even know are monitoring you. I think it is far easier to proxy all basic webtraffic rather than trying to list every single site that collects information about you.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
The best thing to do here would be to poison the well. Create a simple script that runs Google searches on random "hot" words.
Se it up as a distributed.net style program and spread it all over the world. Within a few weeks, the top searches would be on words like "bomb" and "incest" and "child porn". Within a few months, Google's search analasys would be worthless. Not only that, but anyone trying to log the data to find a terrorist would be completely swamped.
This could work for phones too. Set up Skype to dial your home phone number when you are at work or asleep. Have your computer read a list of "hot" words into Skype. Watch as the NSA begins to pull out their hair over the millions of hour-long phonecalls talking about bomb-making.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
It may be naive, but I'm gambling on the fact that Google's database is large and I'm probably a very small, uninteresting part of it. If I do want to conduct research in **********, I'll invent a new pseudonym or access using my neighbor's open wifi.
You have more to fear from slashdot's awesome comment saving system. All the baddie's must do is pay the nominal subscription fee and they have access to every inane comment you have ever posted here.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest