Obfuscate your search history

Some time ago I wrote that Google knows a lot about you just by looking at your search history. Just remember Google flue prognosis. This is relevant for companies who's strategy might implicitly be revealed by searches of employees as well as for average persons whose most private interests can be revealed.

When have you last searched for "Dating" or a "New job" ?

However there is a way to protect yourself against this. It is a bit similar to the mechanism we described to protect you from the facebook data monster. For every search request you do, make several fake searches. By this method you obfuscate your searches and hide them in the noise of fake searches. It will be very difficult for Google to sort out the "real" search requests and the fake ones.


Additionally we have in mind an easy mechanism how to automate this obfuscation. A browser plugin (for individuals) or the Internet gateway (for companies) could generate random additional search requests for each normal search. You search once for "Dating" and the plugin will generate about ten additional searches with random search terms. Results from the fake searches will be suppressed and not shown to you. You will only see the relevant search while the plugin protects your privacy in the background.

We think this would be an easy and powerful mechanism to protect your search privacy and we are even thinking about building a small Firefox plugin as a demo and open source it.

What do you think ?

OJ

What Facebook knows about non-members

Recently a German site (heise) reported that facebook collects substantial information about non-members, just by storing and consolidating data which is entered by other facebook members. For example you might end up in their database, only by some of your friends uploading their entire address book. If multiple of your friends do this, facebook might even derive your complete social graph.

As every mail address is certainly stored in several address books somewhere, facebook might pretty soon have data about every single person on earth (ok maybe not everybody, but at least everybody with online activity).

So what can you do about this ? I see only one mechanism: obfuscation.
So if you want to protect your privacy, then build on the data they already have:

• create a facebook account
• link to lots of your friends
• and make sure to link to plenty of wrong friends, (be sure plenty of them will accept),
• then enter a lot of wrong data about you,
• and choose very wrong data,  so that all your friends will know that your account is rubbish

And why create only one wrong account...create dozen wrong accounts.

Let us screw the facebook database and get some basic privacy by obfuscation !
Lets not complain about missing privacy but do something for it.
We will make their data worthless ! (ok, please hear the ironic subtext to this)

Any good tips, how to mess with data ?
OJ