How in the Tech

Still love Google while maintaining your privacy

By Adam Myers ⋅ January 20, 2010 ⋅ Tags: Google, Privacy

Who knows more about the citizens in their own country, Kim Jong-Il or Google? That’s the question the site GoogleSharing asks it’s visitors. Whether we realize it, or even want to admit it, Google is prevalent all across the Internet and as such has the ability to track users whether we are logged into a Google Account or not. Every visit to a website that displays Google Adsense is a potential IP trail across the Internet from your computer. Cookies are also likely written to your system via your browser by Google. It may all be harmless, but it’s happening. The fact that Google is everywhere, you may feel it is hopeless to avoid it’s reach. That isn’t exactly the case and the solution isn’t as drastic as one may think.

GoogleSharing is an anonymous proxy service that sets out to do one thing – maintain your privacy as it relates to all things Google. The idea is simple – any use of Google services that do not contain a login, like a Google Search is forwarded to the GoogleSharing proxy service that replaces the uniquely identifying information with the information of GoogleSharing itself. Meaning, if you searched monkeys wearing kilts Google would see the search as if it came from GoogleSharing, not the IP address of your computer.

Now, anonymous proxies is nothing really new or exciting but GoogleSharing does offer a unique implementation – it only proxy’s requests destined to Google. This filter is possible by the installation of a Firefox add-on that handles all the heavy lifting for you. The add-on also provides a convenient method to enable and disable the proxy on a whim – should the situation arrive.

I can hear you asking however, if we don’t trust Google with our privacy why would we trust a random third party service? Here is what GoogleSharing says to that:

The only thing that we have is our reputations, which we feel are fairly strong in this area. However, we have also made the GoogleSharing proxy code available, and you can easily change the GoogleSharing proxy settings in the Firefox Addon. So if you don’t trust us, hopefully you can find someone that you do trust, or run a GoogleSharing proxy yourself.

GoogleSharing is a free option that’s available for users that have some concerns with Google knowing just about everything about them. If that sounds like you, it’s worth a look in my opinion.