Google has the means to track users even if they are not logged into one of the many services provided by the company. Several options are available to create user profiles based on the searches conducted. This includes tracking IP addresses, analyzing Google Analytics data and cookies to track a user’s searches and activities over a period of time.
Google Sharing has been designed to protect users so that Google is not able to track their activities on the Internet. The concept is simple. Google Sharing uses a series of proxy servers that have been specifically designed to work with Google services that do not require a login. Every access to such a Google service, like Google search for instance, will be routed automatically through a Google Sharing proxy server that will replace the identifying data of the user with its own.
This means that Google will not be able to identify the user based on cookies or the IP address as those are substituted by the proxy server.
The GoogleSharing system consists of a custom proxy and a Firefox Addon. The proxy works by generating a pool of GoogleSharing “identities,” each of which contains a cookie issued by Google and an arbitrary User-Agent for one of several popular browsers. The Firefox Addon watches for requests to Google services from your browser, and when enabled will transparently redirect all of them (except for things like Gmail) to a GoogleSharing proxy. There your request is stripped of all identifying information and replaced with the information from a GoogleSharing identity.
This “GoogleShared” request is then forwarded on to Google, and the response is proxied back to you. Your next request will get a different identity, and the one you were using before will be assigned to someone else. By “sharing” these identities, all of our traffic gets mixed together and is very difficult to analyze.
The proxy code has been made available by the developer’s so that it can be analyzed by security experts and installed by webmasters who want to run the proxy on their own web server.
The Firefox add-on provides access to a button to quickly disable and enable the Google proxy server. The options also provide the means to change the proxy server used (e.g. switch to a custom one installed on a web server), exclude Google services from being routed through the proxy and to exclude languages from appearing in the search results.
The Firefox add-on is currently available for Firefox 3 but not for the latest Firefox 3.6 releases.
Related Articles:
Automatic Web Proxy Server In Firefox1-Click Web Proxy Extension For Google Chrome
Protected Search Lets You Use Google Without Being Tracked
Free Web Proxy List, Custom Proxy Server Guide
Web Proxy Server List
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This does not work when you use Google DNS Helper (switch to Google Public DNS)
Should this be seen as a supplement to Scroogle??
I’d say it is an alternative to Scroogle
I can confirm it won’t work with v2.0.
i can’t try it.
It completely disables Google Translate.
With no Google-related cookies and a dynamic IP address, on an other browser than Google Chrome, using moreover on Firefox the OptimizeGoogle extension, I wonder if there are still some User IDs available for Big Google …
I dislike the idea of proxies, because of bounced privacy issues (how am I to be confident or not in a unknown’s helping hand?), and for speed issue.
Let’s not be paranoid, but if we are indeed concerned with both privacy and anti-stats issues, then one has to remain logical, and coherent.
Sometimes I wonder if one day I will not just give a damn about the whole privacy stuff, surfing is becoming an epic adventure, as we get trapped between our friends’ curiosity and our enemies’ malware… anyway, c’est la vie …
myspace
kool
Scroogle is down. Is there a way to use googlesharing with opera or other browsers? I don’t want third party addon in a browser…
It seems to be an excellent alternative to Scroogle. “Anynymous”… Why the problem with an add-on? Doesn’t sound like you’ve used Firefox lately. Try it. It’s very seamless.
To address a few of the comments above:
*The newer versions of GoogleSharing (>=0.19, I believe) support end-to-end SSL which prevents snooping by the GSProxy operator using the vanilla install. Of course someone could modify the code to their own desire, but that’s a whole other problem…
*The GoogleSharing Firefox add-on is no longer 3rd party. You can download it directly from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/googlesharing/