gHacks technology news » track me now http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:38:28 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Track Me Not Firefox Extension http://www.ghacks.net/2006/08/23/track-me-not-firefox-extension/ http://www.ghacks.net/2006/08/23/track-me-not-firefox-extension/#comments Wed, 23 Aug 2006 07:06:51 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2006/08/23/track-me-not-firefox-extension/ We all witnessed AOLs bold move to offer a public download of 20 million searches that more than 500k of their users had conducted over a period of three months. The backlash from the internet community and the media was enourmous and as I expected AOL quickly fired three of its employees including CTO Maureen Govern. This does not help the 500k users whose searches are now public accessible.

If they would have used the Firefox extension Track Me Not the profiling of those searches would be way harder. Instead of using proxies and other methods to avoid detection the track me not extension sends periodically bogus searches to major search engines. The main goal of track me not seems to be to avoid the profiling of users by search engines. It is hard to say what they actually do with the data but a possible scenario could be that they either sell the data to marketing companies or use the data for their own marketing purposes.

Track Me Not runs as a low priority background task in firefox “that periodically issues randomized search-queries to popular search engines, e.g., AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN.” Track Me Not is currently able to generate three million static querries and further versions will most likely generate the fake searches dynamically to further improve this method.

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