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GoogleSharing is a special kind of anonymizing proxy service, designed for a very specific threat. It ultimately aims to provide a level of anonymity that will prevent Google from tracking your searches, movements, and what websites you visit. GoogleSharing is not a full proxy service designed to anonymize all your traffic, but rather something designed exclusively for your communication with Google. Our system is totally transparent, with no special "alternative" websites to visit. Your normal work flow should be exactly the same.
Where GoogleSharing Comes In GoogleSharing is a system that mixes the requests of many different users together, such that Google is not capable of telling what is coming from whom. GoogleSharing aims to do a few very specific things: Provide a system that will prevent Google from collecting information about you from services which don't require a login. Make this system completely transparent to the user. No special websites, no change to your work flow. Leave your non-Google traffic completely untouched, unredirected, and unaffected. 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 result is that you can transparently use Google search, images, maps, products, news, etc... without Google being able to track you by IP address, Cookie, or any other identifying HTTP headers. And only your Google traffic is redirected. Everything else from your browser goes directly to its destination.
Originally posted by SaturnFX
If your a Tor user, you don't have to worry about it anyhow though...so its a bit redundant
Aren't one-hop proxies insecure? Shouldn't I use Tor? It depends on what you're trying to achieve. GoogleSharing is not designed as a system for provably strong anonymity in the face of an adversary that is simultaneously monitoring all communication across the internet. GoogleSharing is designed to provide a level of anonymity that prevents Google from building a profile on your day-to-day activity. If you need directions to your Top-Secret rendevouz point, and it's critical for you to prevent intelligence agencies from later determining who requested those directions, use Tor. But Tor is so slow as to be unusable for proxying every single one of your day-to-day non-critical requests, and that's where GoogleSharing comes in.