Outsmarting The Google
Neo: The Google.
Morpheus: Do you want to know what it is?
Neo: Yes.
Morpheus: The Google is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. (quote from IMDB)
A bit far fetched? Maybe.
But the point has been reached where Google isn’t giving us information. We are. We’re feeding it with our thoughts, our private correspondence, our pictures and videos… Google knows more about ourselves than we do.
A Czech media scholar we met yesterday in Brno, Jakub Macek, wants to pressurize Google into becoming more transparent. He wants to build a Firefox add-on that sends random requests to Google servers, in order to put noise into our profiles.
He’s currently looking for a programmer that would build it. Do you know one?
Surely random requests could be filtered and ignored in any profiling as they would appear random as opposed to an individual’s searches which would form patterns. A more effective answer would be to set Firefox to delete or poison the Google cookie after each session.
Peter,
I doubt that Google’s computers AI is high enough to detect a false query. (If you have information on this, do share it!
The point of sending false requests to the Google is not only to protect oneself, it’s also a way to nullify the great amount of data it collects on aggregated searches (something this blog analyzes a lot!)
That said, a FF addon that poison Google cookies sounds great! Do you know of a developer that could do that?