Google Sharing Proxy [Firefox]

Google has the means to track users even if they are not logged into one of the many services provided by the company. Several options are available to create user profiles based on the searches conducted. This includes tracking IP addresses, analyzing Google Analytics data and cookies to track a user’s searches and activities over a period of time.

Google Sharing has been designed to protect users so that Google is not able to track their activities on the Internet. The concept is simple. Google Sharing uses a series of proxy servers that have been specifically designed to work with Google services that do not require a login. Every access to such a Google service, like Google search for instance, will be routed automatically through a Google Sharing proxy server that will replace the identifying data of the user with its own.

This means that Google will not be able to identify the user based on cookies or the IP address as those are substituted by the proxy server.

The GoogleSharing system consists of a custom proxy and a Firefox Addon. The proxy works by generating a pool of GoogleSharing “identities,” each of which contains a cookie issued by Google and an arbitrary User-Agent for one of several popular browsers. The Firefox Addon watches for requests to Google services from your browser, and when enabled will transparently redirect all of them (except for things like Gmail) to a GoogleSharing proxy. There your request is stripped of all identifying information and replaced with the information from a GoogleSharing identity.

This “GoogleShared” request is then forwarded on to Google, and the response is proxied back to you. Your next request will get a different identity, and the one you were using before will be assigned to someone else. By “sharing” these identities, all of our traffic gets mixed together and is very difficult to analyze.

The proxy code has been made available by the developer’s so that it can be analyzed by security experts and installed by webmasters who want to run the proxy on their own web server.

The Firefox add-on provides access to a button to quickly disable and enable the Google proxy server. The options also provide the means to change the proxy server used (e.g. switch to a custom one installed on a web server), exclude Google services from being routed through the proxy and to exclude languages from appearing in the search results.