"If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place."
Suppose, I wouldn't want Google to know that I am searching for young singles on the internet, you would think that logging out of your Google account might keep Google from mapping the search queries to a specific user. But you are wrong, Google can still track your usage using some smart algorithms which Google is very good at.
Google knows whether you were logged in to a Google account or not, they know everything you've ever searched for, what search results you clicked on, what news you read, and every place you've ever gotten directions to. Most of the time, Google Analytics even know which websites you visited that you didn't reach through Google. If you use Gmail, they know the content of every email you've ever sent or received, whether you've deleted it or not. These days they are even branching out into collecting your realtime GPS location and your DNS lookups. In short, not only do they know a lot about what you're doing, they also have significant insight into what you're thinking.
So how do you protect your privacy from being exploited?
A very nice firefox add-on known as GoogleSharing.
About GoogleSharing
GoogleSharing is a special kind of anonymizing proxy service, that will prevent Google from tracking your searches, movements, and what websites you visit. GoogleSharing is designed to anonymize your traffic exclusively your communication with Google.
How GoogleSharing hides you?
GoogleSharing is a system that mixes the requests of many different users together, such that Google is not capable of telling what is coming from whom. GoogleSharing aims to do a few very specific things:
1. Provide a system that will prevent Google from collecting information about you from services which don't require a login.
2. Make this system completely transparent to the user. No special websites, no change to your work flow.
3. Leave your non-Google traffic completely untouched, unredirected, and unaffected.
Working:-
The GoogleSharing system consists of a custom proxy and a Firefox Addon. The proxy works by generating a pool of GoogleSharing "identities," each of which contains a cookie issued by Google and an arbitrary User-Agent for one of several popular browsers. The Firefox Addon watches for requests to Google services from your browser, and when enabled will transparently redirect all of them (except for things like Gmail) to a GoogleSharing proxy. There your request is stripped of all identifying information and replaced with the information from a GoogleSharing identity.
This "GoogleShared" request is then forwarded on to Google, and the response is proxied back to you. Your next request will get a different identity, and the one you were using before will be assigned to someone else. By "sharing" these identities, all of our traffic gets mixed together and is very difficult to analyze.
The GoogleSharing proxy even constantly injects false but plausible search requests through all the identities.
You can use Google without being tracked by IP address, Cookie, or any other identifying HTTP headers. And only your Google traffic is redirected. Everything else from your browser goes directly to its destination.
Where Google has failed to provide universal HTTPS support, GoogleSharing has. All requests to a GoogleSharing proxy are sent via HTTPS. These eventually have to be proxied out as HTTP from GoogleSharing to Google, but your traffic is encrypted on the first path.
Running A GoogleSharing Proxy
Proxy code is available so that anyone can run a GoogleSharing proxy instance in addition to the one that they're running.
Experts Review:-
Google knows whether you were logged in to a Google account or not, they know everything you've ever searched for, what search results you clicked on, what news you read, and every place you've ever gotten directions to. Most of the time, Google Analytics even know which websites you visited that you didn't reach through Google. If you use Gmail, they know the content of every email you've ever sent or received, whether you've deleted it or not. These days they are even branching out into collecting your realtime GPS location and your DNS lookups. In short, not only do they know a lot about what you're doing, they also have significant insight into what you're thinking.
So how do you protect your privacy from being exploited?
About GoogleSharing
GoogleSharing is a special kind of anonymizing proxy service, that will prevent Google from tracking your searches, movements, and what websites you visit. GoogleSharing is designed to anonymize your traffic exclusively your communication with Google.
How GoogleSharing hides you?
GoogleSharing is a system that mixes the requests of many different users together, such that Google is not capable of telling what is coming from whom. GoogleSharing aims to do a few very specific things:
1. Provide a system that will prevent Google from collecting information about you from services which don't require a login.
2. Make this system completely transparent to the user. No special websites, no change to your work flow.
3. Leave your non-Google traffic completely untouched, unredirected, and unaffected.
Working:-
The GoogleSharing system consists of a custom proxy and a Firefox Addon. The proxy works by generating a pool of GoogleSharing "identities," each of which contains a cookie issued by Google and an arbitrary User-Agent for one of several popular browsers. The Firefox Addon watches for requests to Google services from your browser, and when enabled will transparently redirect all of them (except for things like Gmail) to a GoogleSharing proxy. There your request is stripped of all identifying information and replaced with the information from a GoogleSharing identity.
This "GoogleShared" request is then forwarded on to Google, and the response is proxied back to you. Your next request will get a different identity, and the one you were using before will be assigned to someone else. By "sharing" these identities, all of our traffic gets mixed together and is very difficult to analyze.
The GoogleSharing proxy even constantly injects false but plausible search requests through all the identities.
You can use Google without being tracked by IP address, Cookie, or any other identifying HTTP headers. And only your Google traffic is redirected. Everything else from your browser goes directly to its destination.
Where Google has failed to provide universal HTTPS support, GoogleSharing has. All requests to a GoogleSharing proxy are sent via HTTPS. These eventually have to be proxied out as HTTP from GoogleSharing to Google, but your traffic is encrypted on the first path.
Running A GoogleSharing Proxy
Proxy code is available so that anyone can run a GoogleSharing proxy instance in addition to the one that they're running.
Experts Review:-
- GoogleSharing is a very light weight proxy service without any pesky installation.
- Keep in mind however that GoogleSharing is not an anonymizer, so do not rely on for IP spoofing.
- It integrates very well with firefox and you can toggle it on or off just by a single mouse click.
- It does not hinter your browsing speed like most proxies do.
- The HTTPS support is no hoax, it does provide an end-to-end encryption up to the GoogleSharing server.
- You can also provide your resources for contributing to a GoogleSharing server.
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