Guest Post: In this post Vincent Toubiana from SquiggleSR talks about his new Firefox add-on.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN record user queries and clicks to establish accurate profiles used to provide personalized services and let advertisers target their audience. These search profiles represent a constant threat to user’s privacy. In addition these profiles are used by advertising companies therefore the queries you issued might have an impact on next job offers, promotion on your life insurance and the price of your health insurance.

Aiming to let users manage their search profiles, SquiggleSR generates false queries, similarly to TrackMeNot. The novelty of SquiggleSR is to let users personalize their search profiles by selecting subjects about which they want to simulate interest/disinterest.

Keywords used by SquiggleSR are extracted from RSS (Really Simple Subscription) flow titles. OPML format is supported so that the user can easily import RSS list from Nevtibes or Google Reader account. This RSS list can then be modified to simulate fake interests about particular topics or hide some real interests.

In order to simulate realist user behaviours, SquiggleSR also simulate clicks on non-sponsored search results. Motivated by the new controversial advertising system Phorm, a new feature is added to deceive cookie tracking.

SquiggleSR will automatically ask you if you want to import a RSS list from your Google Reader account. This list can be edited at any time through SquiggleSr interface which is available in the “Tools” menu of Firefox. If you don’t want to import your RSS subscriptions, you can use the default configuration file and edit it through SquiggleSR interface (RSS Flows section) and import a list later.

SquiggleSR also exctracts keywords from Yahoo! and Google alerts, just type the appropriated keyword in the coppesponding text zone. The state of SquiggleSR (on/off) is indicated on the bottom right corner of the Firefox window. A simple click on the logo allow you to launch SquiggleSR.

Although we cannot completely hide your queries, we really think that search engines won’t be able to know your profile, but merely to guess the part of the profile you want to show.

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