Take Control of your Digital Dossier

Gina Trapani has a good post up on Lifehacker: Break Google's Monopoly on Your Data: Switch to Yahoo Search, focusing on how to diversify your online life a bit by mixing up your searches across services. The article goes into quite a bit of detail comparing Google and Yahoo! search results.

I've written before about basic browser privacy and geolocation. I've also outlined many tips for diversifying your digital egg basket and managing some of the data that makes its way into your digital dossier.

I want to use this post to highlight some additional tools to augment some of those practices.

Clearly, the best solution for search privacy is to do all searches from an alternate browser that is not logged in to any commercial service, rejects all 3rd-party cookies, and automatically clears all personalized data (especially cookies, cache, and history) upon exit. It's very easy to set up Firefox or Opera for this purpose. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader for now to decide whether to use the Google Chrome browser with or without its special unique identifier technologies.

An interesting Firefox tool for search privacy is TrackMeNot:

TrackMeNot is a lightweight browser extension that helps protect web searchers from surveillance and data-profiling by search engines. It does so not by means of concealment or encryption (i.e. covering one's tracks), but instead, paradoxically, by the opposite strategy: noise and obfuscation. With TrackMeNot, actual web searches, lost in a cloud of false leads, are essentially hidden in plain view. User-installed TrackMeNot works with the Firefox Browser and popular search engines (AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN) and requires no 3rd-party servers or services.

Track me not also selectively "clicks-through" on non-ad links available in the simulated searches to better mimic real user behavior.

A clean browser as described above is actually a great overall strategy for general browsing. Periodically quitting the browser re-establishes a relatively clean slate. If you prefer to keep your cookies, you can specifically opt-out of advertising tracking cookies one-by-one. But aside from the irony of avoiding some cookies by setting others, this path is fraught with peril as it only works for the browser you do it with, and for only as long as you DON'T purge your cookies. One solution to these problems for Firefox users is the Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out (TACO):

This tool sets permanent, generic, non personally identifiable opt-out cookies in the user's browser, which will prevent 40 different online advertising networks (including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo) from displaying highly targeted advertisements using the highly detailed information on users' web surfing habits which they collect.

Unlike other earlier opt-out solutions, this tool will make the cookies completely persistent. That is, clearing the browser's cookies will delete all other installed cookies, except these.

While we're on the subject of cookies, don't forget about the particularly insidious Adobe Flash cookies, which few people are even aware of, and even fewer know how to manage:

Flash Player Settings Manager

A Firefox tool to help manage this more easily is BetterPrivacy, which among other things:

...is a Super-Cookie Safeguard which protects from usually undeletable LSO's (Flash-Cookies) or DOM Storage Objects

As Microsoft Silverlight becomes more prevalent, there will need to be similarly increased awareness of its persistent storage and how users can manage it.

If it still sounds like there are too many holes in the process, there's always the nuclear option... completely block all communication with ad (and malware) servers in your hosts file. This works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and covers not only your browsers, but all applications attempting to communicate with servers you deem offensive. It does take some active ongoing management though to achieve a good balance.

It's a good general practice to diversify your use of services and providers, using multiple accounts across different companies. Keep your browsers as clean as practical and change your IP address regularly too.

Questions or further suggestions? Leave a comment.