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Comment by psadauskas | Hacker News Reader

Someone should write a Firefox plugin to allow people to anonymously exchange google cookies, like you can with the grocery store club cards.

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http://www.googlesharing.net/

It sounds good in concept, but I'm concerned that somebody searching for child pornography or similar could be associated with myself. I have the same fear of running a TOR exit node.

It gives you plausible deniability, which is the point. Nobody can prove you really did those searches (though you can't prove the converse either).

It might give you plausible deniability in front of a jury (emphasis on might), but that says nothing about assumptions or biases made by law enforcement officials or prosecutors.

Yes, plausible deniability is pretty useless after the police have arrested you at 6am in your home after bashing down your door, and all your neighbours have found out that you've been accused of being a pedophile.

To go with what the sibling poster said: when you're so much as accused of paedophilia in this country, any sort of real expectation of due process or rational justice goes to shit. Plausible deniability won't be of much help.

Actually it gives you plausible culpability, not plausible deniability. This idea that people actually don't get charged/tried/convicted because the evidence is a little flimsy is completely false.

What you say: "I did this cookie thing. I never searched for any sort of kiddie porn on the internet."

What the jury of your peers hears: "Child molester trying to pretend he didn't do it."

What the judge does: Extra time in prison because you aren't taking responsibility for your crimes.

Enjoy your prison sentence.

Plausible deniability is needed when you want to hide your role in something. Since I'm not sharing kiddie porn, I have actual deniability. No TOR traffic needed.

Real does not imply convincing, sadly.

The question is, plausible to whom? If the judge doesn't get it, you have a problem.

I don't see how they would associate that with you. Only the exit node for the google queries would be suspect, and I'm pretty sure most don't keep logs.

As I understand it, the client plugin and the proxy are different programs. I don't think you have to run an "exit node" to use it. Though it obviously wouldn't work if no one would be running one, but that's a different issue.

Is there a version that works with FF8?

Firefox 10 defaults add-ons to compatible. I'd try that instead.

Debian and default packages, but I'll check what's in experimental. Thanks.

I've manually edited install.rdf to make it compatible with recent versions of Firefox. I've been running GS for 3 months now, no issues.

I have found Firefox add-on OptimizeGoogle [1, 2] quite promising. I'm not sure if it does exactly what you are looking for though. Unfortunately the development is being stopped due to resources issues.

[1] http://www.optimizegoogle.com/ [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/optimizegoogl...

Look at http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ it will do random queries so that the data that is collected does not make sense.

Handing your search data off to other people still opens up potential privacy problems. There was a FF plugin that would run random web traffic in the background based on various RSS feeds you pointed at it. I forget the name but I am sure you could easily modify that to do google searches. This would obfuscate your real data just as well without handing it off to other people.

Don't like the machine? Pile more shit on it!

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