Paranoid Browsing: anti-profiling plugin seeks feedback - Boing Boing

Ben West read my novel Little Brother in tandem with the Edward Snowden leaks about NSA spying, and it got him thinking about a browser plugin called Paranoid Browsing to make it harder to profile your traffic based on surveillance. He's posted the source-code to GitHub and looking for critical feedback about the robustness of the system -- remember, the only experimental methodology for validating a security system is public discussion, because otherwise, you never know if your system is secure, or just secure against people who are stupider than you.

Many systems have been proposed to create a "profile" of users based on their browsing history. A constant problem with these systems is that they have difficulty filtering out which pieces of your browsing history are "relevant" and which are noise.[1]

Paranoid Browsing exacerbates this difficulty by creating a background tab which browses the Internet, creating a false set of preferences. By default, it browses the most popular American web sites, but it can be configured to browse other, more niche sites to create a more targeted false profile.

Life imitates art : From the Chrome download page for the plugin :

PB was inspired by fictional software described in Cory Doctorow's book Little Brother: "It even throws up a bunch of 'chaff' communications that are supposed to disguise the fact that you're doing anything covert. So while you're receiving a political message one character at a time, [it] is pretending to surf the Web and fill in questionnaires and flirt in chat-rooms. Meanwhile, one in every five hundred characters you receive is your real message, a needle buried in a huge haystack."