Wired:
I just Googled “alarm dust,” “alibi sweatshirt,” and “sleuth intelligence.” Then I shopped for industrial dehydrators, scanned a Pinterest page for concrete decks, and read something about nuclear war.
The thing is, I’m not in the market for a new dehydrator. Concrete decks aren’t really my style, and I still have no idea what “alarm dust” is. I didn’t visit any of these web sites of my own volition—a website called Internet Noise did, all to obscure my real browsing habits in a fog of fake search history.
This won’t actually “protect your privacy” but the idea is interesting – make your search history useless to advertisers. And, if you’re bored, watching the site do its searches is weirdly fun.
Does he realize that his ISP doesn’t know what he’s searching for on Google if, like everyone, he uses Google via https?
It’s been the default for Google search since 2011.
HTTPS hides everything but the destination IP and port from the middleman.
And if you’re worried about Google knowing what you’re searching for, maybe try an engine that isn’t run by an advertising company?
This assumes HTTPS is unbreakable to the government.
And it probably is, but it is an assumption. You might need to be a little paranoid to believe otherwise, but not necessarily enough to be mentally ill.
And it fills your browser with all sorts of random garbage as Amazon attempts to profit on your exciting new hobby of collecting bulldozers, or whatever it is you randomly searched for. 😛
HTTPS is readily breakable by the people who own the network you’re using.
We do it ourselves as a part of DLP (Data loss prevention) measures. HIPAA violations can be assessed per individual violation (someone accidentally ships out 150K records in a spreadsheet, that’s 150K violations) and that’s a big incentive for those in the medical information industry.