The Infinite Brief

Scripts and browser extensions might be able to fill your Web history with random searches and site visits.

Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Staff Technologist Jeremy Gillula is skeptical about the new privacy method but hopes he’s wrong. “I’d want to see solid research showing how well such a noise-creation system works on a large scale before I trust it.”

A big challenge for attempts to pollute browsing history is that computers are extremely good at finding patterns, even when the data you want to hide is surrounded by a huge number of random data points.

This type of browser pollution system “might work for a bit,” but “if it becomes widespread then ISPs will start throwing resources at solving it,” Gillula wrote.