I’ve always been a bit on weary side of having one entity, any entity other than myself, have access to and store everything that I do. Google clearly falls into that category with, among other things, email, browsing history (think Analytics, the Doubleclick and AdMob acquisitions and the scariest one yet, their own DNS), documents, phone calls and of course, the ever revealing search history.
Now I do admire what Google has accomplished both for themselves and for the greater public. They’ve accelerated adoption of various technologies by the masses, development – by pushing standards, accelerating the web, et al – and actual usage – my mom uses gmail, gdocs and most shockingly, VOIP with their Voice product. I would also say that their constant rollout of services, in addition to their profits, has motivated and inspired countless other entrepreneurs to start new ventures. The number of ex-Google employees with startups is already dizzying.
So, all told, Google does benefit us all. That said, I still don’t want them to know every last shred of my online activity. I have already mentioned how one can go in and delete one’s search history with the Google Dashboard, and that is helpful but not enough. Enter GoogleSharing.
Now GoogleSharing isn’t a privacy panacea but it’s a good start. It’s a Firefox add-on which alters how your Google searches are handled. It’s a proxy for Google searches, and they have a pool of Google UserIDs at their disposal. So when you search, the add-on executes the search using one of those alternate IDs and returns you the results. Simple notion but effective and reminds me a bit of the logic behind TOR and its invaluable efforts in providing anonymity for those that need it.
As a sidenote, if you’re already running some sort of proxy then you should be able to just point to their proxy server. I happen to use and really like FoxyProxy for managing my domain specific proxies, and the aforementioned TOR along with a couple of other proxies. I’ve been away from the USA for a while now and access is limited by GeoIP and most definitely due to my poor choice of ISP.
Enjoy…
Links:
The Register piece on the Google Dashboard:
The Google Dashboard:
GoogleSharing:
FoxyProxy:
