p2pnet - rss feed: Phorm SquiggleSR link
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There’s a post about the Phorm Pharce on IT Pro which, in turn points back to a story p2pnet posted yesterday.
So?
Well, it has Phorm nemesis Alex Hanff revealing the European Commission now has its eye on so-called targeted advertiser Phorm.
The ePrivacy Directive obliges Member States to ensure the confidentiality of communications and related traffic data through national legislation, observes the commission statement quoted in our story.
Among other things, “In particular, they shall prhobit [sic] listening, tapping, storage or other kinds of interception or surveillance of communication and the related traffic data by persons other than the users without their consent, which must be freely given, specific and informed indication of the user’s wishes,” it says.
“Great news, but I’m afraid that it won’t be enough,” says Mike Skuse in an ITÂ Pro comment post.
“So BT can just like Google: propose a new service and ask users to accept new Terms of Services describing the use of Phorm. Nevertheless, it’s a good point for BT subscribers.”
But, “@Mike,” responds Janos, going on:
“If you’re worried about your recorded data, I developed a Firefox add-on called SquiggleSR which simulates browsing activities to hide your real interest. Obviously, it’s free (GPL).”
What’s it all about?
Here’s what Janos says on the SquiggleSR site >>>
SquiggleSR is a privacy enforcement add-on for Firefox. More precisely, SquiggleSR protects search engine users’ privacy. Because search engines record all your queries and clicks, they have a lot of information used to establish accurate profiles. Although these profiles are useful to provide personalized services and ads, they represent a threat to your privacy.
So far, most privacy tools anonymize your queries. A brief note of the Electronic Frontier Foundation exposes some tips to enforce your privacy.
Another solution is to generate artificial queries to make some noise around your real queries. Supposing that search engines can not distinguish artificial queries, they will establish false profile. Unfortunately, these tools remove every personalization benefit.
SquiggleSR protects your privacy with minor effects on searches personalization. Actually, we let users select about which topics they will generate false queries. Moreover SquiggleSR generates personalized and realistic queries. Indeed, keywords used in queries are extracted from RSS flows titles.
Generally, the RSS flows we subscribe to, concern topics that we find interesting. So the queries generated are queries that you could have issued. SquiggleSR supports OPML files and so lets you import easily your RSS subscriptions. Then you can add or remove some RSS subscriptions to simulate fake interests about particular topics or hide some real interests. A more classical approach uses popular keywords get from search engine statistics or tags pages.
“Search engines are not your friends,” it adds.
“Friends don’t know so much about you.”
Click here for SquiggleSR. Click here to download the source code.
SquiggleSR is under GPL license.
Good one, Janos 
JN
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