TrackMeNot
15 Sep 2006A few days ago, Peter Abilla published a post about TrackMeNot.
I had read about TrackMeNot a little more than a week before on Bruce Schneier’s blog, and so I already knew TrackMeNot was a flawed idea. Peter also makes some very good points in his post, but, unfortunately, it falls short of pointing out some of the more serious problems with TrackMeNot.
I’ll just summarize the problems here. For further explanation, read Bruce’s post:
- It does not hide your searches (they are still identifiable with you).
- It’s far too easy to spot (and therefore, far too easy for AOL and others to defeat) and it’s schedule is regular & fixed.
- Some of the generated searches are worse than what you would try to hide.
- It wastes lots of bandwidth, while returning absolutely no privacy or security benefit.
I like this quote from Bruce’s post:
Yes, data mining is a signal-to-noise problem. But artificial noise like this isn’t going to help much.
Lamont,
Excellent points.
I’m not sure about your last quote. In n-gram models and studies of entropy in computational linguistics, noise is actually very, very difficult to understand, sift through, and reduce.
Adding noise works, but it doesn’t eliminate the root cause of the problem — yes, eventually search engines can still track you and perhaps identify you via your genuine searches. This noise-making effort is distracting but, you’re right, it doesn’t solve the remaining underlying problem. Nice post.
You’re right about that last quote in this post. If I had included more following the part of Bruce’s post that I quoted, it would have made more sense there.