How Do I Keep My Privacy While Using Google?

hubert.lepicki writes "I use Google all the time. I keep two GMail tabs open when I'm online (one is private, another is a corporate account), I use Google search, and recently I switched to the Chromium browser. Google's services are fast, easy to use and usually reliable. At the same time, I know Google is tracking everything I do; I can see it in search results or their ads on web pages, which tend to match my interests. After the recent post by Mozilla's community director suggesting Bing has a better privacy policy (a response to questionable comments from Google CEO Eric Schmidt), I started to... 'google' ways of keeping my private data safe while browsing and using Google services. The results weren't very helpful, so I ask you, Slashdotters: how do I stay anonymous to Google while using their services?"

Comments

Ideas

[ilovegeorgebush]

TrackMeNot for Firefox is useful for masking your real search engine queries with randomised search terms. That's a start. Not sure if there's a Chrome equivalent. Is Chrome that much of a necessity? Firefox does the job (though it freezes far too often for me). Otherwise, why not exercise some self-constraint and try products from Yahoo, or even host your own? (First post? :P)

Re:Ideas

[Anonymous Coward]

This is like a steer asking, "how can I keep getting this free food and board without being taken to the slaughter house later?"

To Google, you are the product. They are selling advertising. More specifically, they are selling your attention to marketers. Giving you privacy is contradictory to the entire purpose of their existence. They give you nice, fast, free stuff to keep you hooked in to their services and to keep collecting more data so that they can sell more advertising.

There is no privacy using Google services. There never will be. They will keep encroaching into your private info as far as you let them.

Re:Ideas

[quickgold192]

Yes, I've thought about this problem and I've also read about TrackMeNot. Unfortunatly, TrackMeNot has some serious flaws:

1. It randomizes search terms instead of following believable search patterns. Example 'search stream': Shoes, virus protection, Hannah Montana, flamethrower "do it yourself", Hawaii, spark plugs, military surplus, speaker system, Exhaust Flame Thrower Kits... It's pretty easy to see what's real and what's fake.
2. People tend to use search engines in bursts. When I last used TrackMeNot it sent off search queries at regular intervals. The decoy queries would be easy to filter out.
3. Nobody would really be willing to let queries like "donkey sex" or "how to kill the president" get fired off by the software. For true privacy, those would be the most important terms to make the list, so that if someone really *did* search for those, he could just say that it was the software making automatic requests.

I had an idea to fix this:
1. The software would have to monitor your search engine usage and match your searching bursts and searching frequency. Those things can't be hardwired into the software or else algorithms would so some fingerprint-matching on your search queries.
The next part is a little fuzzy:
2a. For every 'search burst' you make, the software can ananomously post the search terms to a central server that other clients read and use as decoys. The problem is filtering out truly private data such as address and names.
2b. If not that, maybe the software can just go loose on the web and look up possible related search terms to search for.

Of course, I'm thinking beyond simple privacy against advertisers. More like legal protection.

Re:Ideas

[rm999]

Careful with TrackMeNot - I used it for awhile, and Google started blocking my real searches, returning an error screen that indicated my searches may not be legitimate. They clearly know when you are using it (who sends in dozens of searches every hour of the day?), and may consider it a violation of their TOS. I don't know about you guys, but if they decided to shut down my account it would be pretty devastating - I backup a lot of information and important e-mails only on gmail.

TrackMeNot

[the linux geek]

Look up the TrackMeNot Firefox extension. It spams Google and the other search engines with randomly generated but plausible search queries, so there's no real way that any of these companies can build a profile on you. If you browse with ads, however, prepare for some really bizarre ones.

You Don't

[phantomcircuit]

If you are logged into gmail you cannot possibly retain your privacy.

Short of deleting all google cookies and changing your ip after using gmail you cannot retain your privacy.

I get cross gmail account ads

[stimpleton]

I work for a company that supplies a specific unique service(Laboratory Service). I use a work gmail account for testing/backup. My personal email is not gmail. To my surprise after using gmail I starting getting spam to my personal account to do with Lab stuff. And some ads in gmail clearly are oriented to my personal stuff. As far as I know I have never crossed the two and strickly keep personal matters out of Gmail.

As with a comment above, "if you have nothing to hide", I don't have anything to hide. But it is somewhat unsettling.

Re:Tor?

[Gothmolly]

Except for the fact that most Tor nodes are trojaned DoD machines, with all sorts of data->disk logging features. Or not. But how could you tell?

Re:You don't

[LockeOnLogic]

There was an old russian KGB adage which went something like "everyone has committed a crime, it's about who we decide to prosecute".

Re:Ideas NOT IP -- proxy servers

[redelm]

Tracking HTTP by IP is extremely unreliable for Google and everyone else -- many corporations and other firewalled institutions run big proxy servers and funnel all their requests from that machine.

Here's what I do...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

1) Use different browser profiles for different web applications.

If you start firefox with these options: -no-remote -ProfileManager it will allow you to run multiple copies simultaneously, each with a separate profile (different set of cookies, different set of plugins, different skins, different bookmarks, different histories, etc).

I create a specific profile for each major web app - I have one for IMDB, one for google searches, one for google mail, one for google voice, etc. And one for generic browsing.

Each profile has a couple of add-ons:
Adblock Plus - general catch-all to block things like doubleclick and the million other trackers
CookieSafe Lite - for fine-grained control of what sites can set cookies
NoScript - for fine-grained control of what sites can use javascript and flash
Redirect Cleaner - for removing those "bounce links" that a lot of sites use to track you when you follow a URL off their site, with the cleaner you go directly to the destination URL
RefControl - for clearing out or rewriting the referrer URL - prevents sites from knowing where you came from when you clicked a URL to their site, sometimes helpful in accessing poorly 'restricted' content
Targetted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out - sets special cookies that sites may choose to obey to say "don't profile me" since these TACOs are not unique-per-user, I figure it can't hurt although it probably doesn't do anything
User Agent Switcher - Lets your browser identify itself as a different browser - this is very important
Ghostery - Informational Only - tells you what tracking sites may be tracking you on any given page (does not block them, and you get false alarms on sites where NoScript blocks javascript, but it is still good for situational awareness)
Better Privacy - Blocks new stealth "super cookies" in Flash and DOM Storage Objects. VERY IMPORTANT

Using the above plugins, I do the following in each profile:
1) Set NoScript to only allow javascript from the one website the profile is intended for - and block flash as much as possible regardless due to cross-profile flash cookies
2) Set CookieSafe that same way and then only for per-session cookies
3) Block and/or auto-delete Flash and DOM Storage cookies with Better Privacy - note flash cookies tend to be shared across all profiles because they go in a folder under "Documents & Settings" on MS Windows and ~/.macromedia/ on Linux. I am still looking at ways to force each profile to use a different directory for flash cookies - until then, block flash as much as possible and auto-delete cookies frequently
4) Set the User Agent to be different in each profile - this gives the appearance of multiple users behind a firewall which is key
5) Load a different theme or skin for each profile to make it easy to visually distinguish between windows so you don't accidentally start browsing the web from your gmail window or vice-versa

All that is a little bit of a pain to set up, an hour or two total. But once in place, I think it is a reasonable compromise for reducing the risk of having your personally identifiable information gleaned in services like Google Mail from being automatically cross-referenced with your browsing habits. I am considering taking it a step further with FoxyProxy configurations to use