TrackMeNot Useful?

Near the beginning of August, news surfaced that AOL has released the search logs of over 650,000 users for research purposes. It wasn’t that big a deal since neither I or anybody else I knew used AOL here in Canada. However, I do search the internet with one of two search engines; either Google or Yahoo!.

People began wondering if there may be a time where Google had to hand over their search logs, but such a thing would go against their privacy policy. However the lawmakers may manipulate our rights to privacy in the future so I wanted to know if there was such a way to “hide your tracks”.

Upon reading the article about AOL releasing their search logs, I came across a related article that mentioned a Firefox extension called TrackMeNot. It claims that it “protects web-searchers against surveillance and data-profiling”, not by covering up one’s tracks, but by adding “noise”. This “noise” is basically bullshit search queries so that your search log becomes so random and of no use for “research purposes”.

It’s become known though that the logs released by AOL went into the hands of the enforcers of justice. Later some individuals were arrested, such as the man who searched up ways to murder someone, who ended up confessing that he was indeed going to murder his wife. I may be inaccurate with the case I just mentioned, but the point is that someone was arrested because of his search queries on AOL which was used as evidence. After learning this, I thought I’d give the TrackMeNot extension a shot.

Even if I had nothing to hide with the way I search, if I’m able to somewhat keep some of my privacy through this extension…why not?

So I installed the extension, and after 2 weeks or so…I’m not really sure if it helps much. I haven’t paid attention to the dumb queries it sends to multiple search engines but today I looked at what it was doing and it was sending queries like: ‘condom sponges’, and ‘nipplebombs duke ellington fingering’. I don’t know about you, but if some cyber-detective was looking at my search logs and saw the latter, they might suspect me of being a terrorist.

You’re probably wondering if there is any means left to protect your privacy online. There is, listen to Stephen Colbert, he knows what he’s doing: