Friday, July 11, 2008

HIDE YOUR SEARCH TRIALS USING FIREFOX TRACKMENOT ADD-ON

Did you know that search engines track your every move while you are searching online? It was reported not long ago in the New York Times
that big search engines such as AOL, Google, Yahoo!, and MSN were all
collecting data from their users. All of these search engines are
monitoring and storing your searches along with other data such as your
behavior while online. This information may in some cases, not only be
seen by those involved with your favorite search engine but also in
many cases, third parties.


TrackMeNotThe idea of TrackMeNot came
about when the creators realized that legislator would take a very long
time in coming and we need something that will protect our Fourth
Amendments now not in months and possibly years to come. TrackMeNot is
a solution that can be used right now to hide your searches in a “cloud
of ghost queries”. The only problem is that you must have a Firefox
browser installed or you are out of luck, on the other hand, Firefox is very easy to download and install just like TrackMeNot.


Using TrackMeNot will give you more privacy and protect your information from search engines that might sell your information to third parties. Installing is very simple.
All you have to do is follow the instructions in plain English. After a
few seconds of installing, you will be able to see that search queries
begin to show up in your status bar.


TrackMeNot Status Bar


These will be sent to search engines, faking them out as to where
you are really going or what you are searching for while online. You
can, if you desire, disable the display function.



The same options are available from the Tools menu of the browser:


TrackMeNot Tools menu


From the available Options you can:


TrackMeNot options


  • Set the Serch Engines that TMN queries
  • Set the queries to be performed (Current Queries)
  • Set the Query Frequency
  • Set the Logging Options and see the performed queries (ShowLog)

You can choose from TrackMeNot version 0.3.x, version 0.4.x, and the newest version 0.5.x with features such as burst-mode, cookie anonymization, real-time search tracking, a few minor bug fixes, and improved timing mechanism and improved logging.


The important question: Can TMN effectively hide my identity?


Here is what the creators of TrackMeNot have to say about this:


To the extent that a third-party tries to identify
you through searches alone, TMN can potentially make this a lot more
difficult. Much depends on the search query terms included in future
versions of TMN. If third-parties are using other means to identify
you, e.g. through IP addresses and information from your ISP, TMN will
be of little use.


Check this blog fully to know how can we protect our ip address and methods to hide the ip address.

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