stevey.eu

GoogleSharing

I came across an intrigu­ing project this morn­ing, called “GoogleSharing”:

Google­Shar­ing is a spe­cial kind of anonymiz­ing proxy ser­vice, designed for a very spe­cific threat. It ulti­mately aims to pro­vide a level of anonymity that will pre­vent google from track­ing your searches, move­ments, and what web­sites you visit. Google­Shar­ing is not a full proxy ser­vice designed to anonymize all your traf­fic, but rather some­thing designed exclu­sively for your com­mu­ni­ca­tion with Google. Our sys­tem is totally trans­par­ent, with no spe­cial “alter­na­tive” web­sites to visit. Your nor­mal work flow should be exactly the same.

Essen­tially, as they like to call it “a spe­cial kind of proxy”. Rather than giv­ing anonymity to all of your traf­fic, it sim­ply takes effect on any traf­fic between you and Google.

The fun­da­men­tal rea­son behind offer­ing such a ser­vice (which is also open source, so you or I can pro­vide alter­nate prox­ies) is to stem the amount of infor­ma­tion Google can col­lect about you, from every­day ser­vices like searches.

In a nut­shell any per­sonal infor­ma­tion is stripped and then all the remain­ing data, or iden­tity, is passed onto another user, and you obtain a new iden­tity, all via the proxy. This mix­ing of infor­ma­tion will make it nearly impos­si­ble for Google to gather the wealth of per­sonal infor­ma­tion it usu­ally does.

For a full, and quite frankly bet­ter expla­na­tion, in far more detail visit the home­page at http://www.googlesharing.net/

The (as of the time of writ­ing) exper­i­men­tal Fire­fox addon is avail­able directly here.