Michael Zimmer.org

For those concerned about the ease at which Web search providers can monitor, capture and profile your search activity, you’ll be pleased to know that some important enhancements have been added to the popular TrackMeNot Firefox extension.
As you might recall, TrackMeNot was developed by Daniel Howe and Helen Nissenbaum to protect against search data profiling by issuing fake queries to popular search-engines: “It hides users’ actual search trails in a cloud of ‘ghost’ queries, significantly increasing the difficulty of aggregating such data into accurate or identifying user profiles.” I like …

The TrackMeNot lightweight browser extension that protects web searchers against surveillance and data-profiling has been upgraded with some important features:
New in version 0.4.x

Dynamic query sets **
Option to select search-engines
Added statusbar context-menu
New windows for log/query display
Option for cross-session logging
New tools/context menu icons
Minor bug fixes

New in version 0.3.x

User-configurable query lists (see TMN->Options)
Randomized query-lengths (1-6 words per query)
Larger word list with ‘actual’ search terms
Better randomization of query scheduling
Now compatible with Firefox 1.5 – 2.0
Interface improvements

The most important improvement (in response to some criticisms) is the dynamic word list feature: TMN first …

As concerns about the privacy of one’s search engine history steadily increase, various solutions have been offered to help avoid the wholesale surveillance and aggregation of one’s search queries. While most solutions rely on attempts to cloak one’s IP address, a new solution instead relies on obfuscation: TrackMeNot.
Developed by Daniel Howe and Helen Nissenbaum, TrackMeNot (TMN) is a Firefox extension (download here) that protects against search data profiling by issuing randomized queries to popular search-engines with fake data:
TrackMeNot runs in Firefox as a low-priority background process that periodically issues …