How To Hide From Google

As an aside see the ad of Microsoft in the story.(follow the link)
Hacker Moxie Marlinspike debuts a tool for using Google services while foiling its data collection techniques.
Google offers Web users a simple trade-off: Let the search giant track a substantial portion of your comings and goings around the Web, and it will offer you a free, superior online experience.

Now an independent security researcher who goes by the name Moxie Marlinspike is making Web users a counter-offer: Take Google’s ( GOOG – news – people ) giveaways and keep your privacy too.

On Tuesday, Marlinspike launched a service he calls Googlesharing, a plug-in for Firefox designed to give users access to Google’s online offerings while cloaking their identity from the company’s data collection tools. By hosting a proxy server with a collection of Google “identities,” the privacy software, which can be accessed at Googlesharing.net, will allow users to temporarily route their traffic through another computer that masks their identity by mixing their online actions with those of other users.

“Each identity looks like a normal user, but everything is mixed up between identities so Google can’t track any individual,” says Marlinspike. That means users can exploit any of Google’s offerings that don’t require logins, such as search, maps or news, without allowing Google to assemble a profile of their activities that can be used for advertising targeting–or, as some users might fear, information that could be subpoenaed by government investigators.

“It’s very hard to stop using Google,” says Marlinspike. “So we need to think about ways that we can use these things and still preserve privacy.”

Googlesharing is hardly the only tool that can flummox Google’s behavioral tracking system. The proxy system Tor, for instance, provides anonymity for any sort of Web browsing by siphoning a user’s data requests through not one but three servers.
http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/19/hacker-marlinspike-privacy-technology-cio-network-google.html?partner=alerts