Tool Generates Fake Searches for Privacy

[Humpty]

Haven't tried this as yet and I doubt I need to.

 

Some may find it of interest.

 

Quote:

 

The tool comes as AOL revealed it had released the search histories of more than 650,000 subscribers. Although user names were not included, the company admitted that the search terms themselves could contain sensitive information. Two AOL employees were fired and a third resigned over the disclosure.

 

The tool, developed by two researchers at New York University, sends random searches, such as "boston clock" and "croissant," to the four largest search engines - Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and AOL. A fake search is made every 12 seconds under default configurations; the tool can generate millions of unique queries from its list, and users can add their own.

 

TrackMeNot, however, works only with the Firefox browser, which has less than 10 percent market share, according to WebSideStory.

 

Link

[Eldmannen]

I have heard of similar such tools before. You can have for a tool that uses a dictionary, then it randomly combine example 1-5 words and search for them at random intervals.

 

A fake search every 12 seconds is a bad idea, because it is a static value, so it would be easy to filter out those searches from a potential log file and because it follows a fixed pattern. Much time of surfing web is spent reading, not searching. I think it would be better if the delay between searches was random such as example 10-900 seconds.

 

In Firefox, I have put my Google cookie to "Allow for session", so that everytime I close Firefox, the cookie gets deleted, and I get a new cookie and id.

[zaphirer]

A fake search every 12 seconds is a bad idea, because it is a static value, so it would be easy to filter out those searches from a potential log file and because it follows a fixed pattern. Much time of surfing web is spent reading, not searching. I think it would be better if the delay between searches was random such as example 10-900 seconds.

 

 

I hadn't thought of that before, thanks for the interesting thought

I never used AOL search, though... and would NEVER even consider having AOL as an ISP...

[Mike Rochip]

I thought this ws an interesting idea but wouldn't running searches all the time use system resources and bandwidth? I guess it wouldn't be an issue on a broadband connection but I would think it would slow down a dialup connection quite a bit.

[Eldmannen]

I thought this ws an interesting idea but wouldn't running searches all the time use system resources and bandwidth? I guess it wouldn't be an issue on a broadband connection but I would think it would slow down a dialup connection quite a bit.

 

Yes, of course it would use some resources and some bandwidth. On a modern computer with a high-speed broadband Internet connection, it's probably isn't noticeable though.