Slashdot Mirror
Hiding From Google
penguinrecorder writes "Google offers Web users a simple trade-off: Let the search giant track a substantial portion of your comings and goings around the Web, and it will offer you a free, superior online experience. Now independent security researcher Moxie Marlinspike is making Web users a counter-offer: take Google's giveaways and keep your privacy too. On Tuesday, Marlinspike launched a service he calls GoogleSharing, a plug-in for Firefox designed to give users access to Google's online offerings while cloaking their identity from the company's data collection tools. By hosting a proxy server with a collection of Google 'identities,' the privacy software will allow users temporarily to route their traffic through another computer that masks their identity by mixing their online actions with those of other users. The system is totally transparent, with no special 'alternative' websites to visit. Your normal work flow should be exactly the same." GoogleSharing only works for those services not requiring a Google login; for the latter, no proxying is done.
If you trust Google, great, but don't say "we". Google's changed - a lot. Given the breaches, and their relentless march of ever more invasive monitoring on every device and platform they can get their fingers into, I trust this random stranger more than Google. Google is a proven risk, this guy's just a potential one.
I'm not a big Google-privacy-paranoia guy, but my faith in them had been on the decline, and their recent China thing has definitely bought them some credibility in my eyes. It's easy to have a knee-jerk cynical reaction to it, but it may well show that they really are still putting principles before profits, and that their "Don't Be Evil" motto is more than a quirky relic of their early days.
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