aaronshaver/GooglePrivacyEnhancer — pull request #2 by clarkbw (2014-05-16 17:20:02+00:00)
Title: a firefox add-on sdk version of the GooglePrivacyEnhancer

Greetings -

You don't need to accept this pull request, I just wanted to let you know this exists. I couldn't sleep last night and I thought your experiment (which was sitting in an old tab I was about to cull) was pretty interesting so I took what I think was the spirit of your work and created a Firefox add-on that performs a very similar task.

The add-on runs in the background performing random google searches using your search term list, effectively always fuzzing your search history as you use Firefox. The add-on could be a lot more robust than it currently is but as it was a quick 1-2 hour hack I think it's in a good enough state.

Some notable difference from your work:

Because I'm using a page-worker I believe your Google logged in state will be used when performing these searches, there's no option to log in or not as you have. Also there's no need for passwords or usernames but if you wanted that control, it isn't there.

I've used a 45 minute randomized window for performing searches. I chose that value somewhat haphazardly but I wanted a long enough window such that Firefox wasn't always humming away with searches in the background. You could easily change this value or convert it to a pref.

I'm caching the search terms indefinitely, only because I didn't want to take on a cache problem with very little sleep behind me. It wouldn't be hard to hold the terms only in memory and grab a new list with every Firefox restart.

Areas of certain improvement.

Tests. nuff said.

Now that I've been running this add-on in my browser for a little while this morning I would really love some kind of feedback. How many searches have run? What terms were used? I guess I could look at my google search history but it would be nice if there was even a little logging to the console.

Certainly let me know what you think, I'll build a copy of the add-on and commit that as well so you don't have to get the add-on sdk environment going yourself. Cheers!