Most people believe that Google is a search engine company. It's not. It's an advertising agency that just happens to own the world's most successful search engine, and every time you use that search engine, they learn a little more about you.

If you're like most internet users, Google knows more about you than you might be comfortable with. 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, thanks to things like Google Analytics, they 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. They know who your friends are, where you live, where you work, and where you spend your free time. They know about your health, your love life, and your political leanings. 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.

Back in April a hacker by the name of Moxie Marlinspike came out with a Firefox addon called GoogleSharing to throw a spanner in Google's works.

The addon watches for requests for Google services such as Search and transparently redirects them to a GoogleSharing proxy server. The server contains a pool of fictitious "identities" -- including cookies -- which are used in place of any personal data you might be unwittingly supplying. The altered request is forwarded to Google, and the response proxied back to you. It all happens swiftly and transparently.

There's a few other clever wrinkles. Pooling all traffic and constantly switching identities makes even the proxy server's traffic hard to analyze, and on top of that the proxy constantly injects false but plausible search requests through all the identities it uses.

The result is that you can transparently use Google search, images, maps, products, news, etc... without Google being able to track you 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.

In operation, it simply requires a click on the Status Bar ...




... to enable or disable it. Brilliant!