GoogleSharing is a pretty ingenious new plugin and service for mixing up your search and browsing history with other net users and transmitting it to Google, so that you are harder to track. I couldn't find an independent source-code audit (which would be reassuring) — anyone want to conduct one?
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 GoogleSharing proxy even constantly injects false but plausible search requests through all the identities.
(via MacWorld UK)
