TrackMeNot: Add-on to Protect Your Internet Privacy
There’s a lightweight browser extension called TrackMeNot for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome that helps protect web searchers from surveillance and data-profiling by search engines.
Protecting privacy when surfing the web is becoming an increasing problem on the net. TrackMeNot is a lightweight browser extension that helps protect web searchers from the major search engines’ surveillance and data-profiling. It does so not by means of concealment or encryption (i.e. covering one’s tracks), but instead, paradoxically, by the opposite strategy: noise and obfuscation (the obscuring of intended meaning in communication, making the message confusing, willfully ambiguous, or harder to understand).
However, whereas similar tools encrypt your surfing habits to prevent tracking, TrackMeNot uses a smokescreen strategy by confusing potential trackers with fake information.
For example, if you search for “new Star Wars movie downloads” on Google, TrackMeNot will confuse any potential trackers with ‘ghost’ queries which make it far more difficult – although not impossible – to make such data into something that could be used to track you. TrackMeNot also uses a dynamic query mechanism which basically means that it learns from your searches and adapts ghost queries appropriately.
While TrackMeNot may not be 100% effective against online tracking, it’s better than doing nothing or going through the hassle of using a proxy.
User-installed TrackMeNot works with Firefox and Chrome browsers and popular search engines (AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and Bing) and requires no 3rd-party servers or services.
TrackMeNot runs in Firefox and Chrome as a low-priority background process that periodically issues randomized search-queries to popular search engines, e.g., AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and Bing. It hides users’ actual search trails in a cloud of ‘ghost’ queries, significantly increasing the difficulty of aggregating such data into accurate or identifying user profiles. To better simulate user behavior TrackMeNot uses a dynamic query mechanism to ‘evolve’ each client (uniquely) over time, parsing the results of its searches for ‘logical’ future query terms with which to replace those already used.
You can check and install this extension by either of the following links below:
