Google maintains a history of every search you’ve ever done, and every video you’ve ever watched on YouTube, every location you’ve ever visited with Google App on your smartphone, and every picture on your phone or computer you’ve ever given them access to. They use this information to build an advertising profile of your likes and dislikes. There is a growing body of circumstantial evidence that they are using this information to personalize your search results and to try to influence your opinion and try to make you more accepting of progressive liberal viewpoints. This is explained in the leaked Google video The Selfish Ledger
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To prevent your search history from being used against you there are two strategies, avoid using all Google products, or try to pollute Google’s data to the point to make it impossible to use against you. If you’re someone who has a job, or lives in a modern first world society, it’s impossible to live your life without interacting with some Google Service on a regular basis. That leaves you with trying to pollute Google’s datastream of data about you. It’s a flawed sollution, that has some issues, but it’s better than doing nothing. We’re going to do this using the Google Track Me Not browser extension. Once you get it installed, you’ll have an option screen similar to the screenshot below.
We suggest setting the Avg. Query Rate much higher than a human could ever search (our is set to 5 queries per minute). Use the RSS feed as it includes different current events into your queries making them look more “natural”. We also suggest using the “bomb“, “porn“, and “pornographie” lists, because it will give you plausible deniability for any searches law enforcement might eventually want to speak to you about. Lastly, we also suggest using the keywords monitored by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), again the more disinformation in your search history the better.
There are some things you should know about using this extension:
- Once you start using this extension you will start getting the “are you a robot” CAPTCHA checks on a regular basis.
- The best way to use this extension is to let it generate the random queries in a search tab. This means random tabs will occasionaly open between your open tabs, it can make it look like your computer has a “virus” and your browser is being “hijacked”, it’s not.
- This extension can be kinda “buggy”. Sometimes it will encounter and error and stop functioning, requiring you to restart your browser to get it to start working again. Other times it will randomly spawn a new tab, sometimes it will respawn multiple tabs, making a mess of things.
- It’s questionable just how effective this “pollution” technique is, see below.
In theory polluting your search history is an effective strategy, actually doing it is another thing entirely. The question is, can Google detect these random search aren’t being done by a human, and are they able to filter them out of your data stream. Google sells advertising on a Pay-Per-Click basis, that means someone is only charged when a user clicks on an ad. This created a massive click-fraud problem where one company would click on another company’s ad to cost them money. Google developed some fairly sophisticated methods of detecting click fraud to combat this. The most effective one, measures the minor “irregularities”, “shakes” or “wobbles” a human has when they move the mouse cursor across the page. Because these queries are being generated in a background tab, and there’s no mouse movement on the page, and is Google ignoring that search query, and not adding it to a person’s search history. Google is pretty tight-lipped about these things, so no one is really sure how well it works, or if it’s even working at all. That said if Google thinks your account isn’t really a human, that will affect the ads and personalization so it’s not a total loss. So even if the “random pollution” doesn’t work as intended, having Google think you’re an automated bot, instead of a human is an improvement.
If you would like to try a different approach to polluting your data stream, Firefox created TrackThis.linka website that will open 100 tabs in your browser. The advantage here is that when you move your mouse to close the tab you will be generating the mouse movements of a real human. The downside is you have to close 100 tabs, and they only have four categories of 100 links, so there’s not a lot of variation.
You should NEVER have the Google App or YouTube App installed on any phone you actually use, it tracks every call you make, every place you visit, every person you are near, and every website you visit. Additionally the amount of personal information that can captured using your phone's accelerometer is terrifying.
- Operational Security - Tips for maintaing online anonymity, and keeping people out of your personal life.
