GoogleSharing is a special proxy service that doesn’t hide what you are searching from Google. Instead, it obscures where the requests are coming from. GoogleSharing is not a full proxy service designed to anonymize traffic. It is exclusively intended for certain aspects of your communication with Google. So there are no “alternative” websites to visit. Your use of the web need not change at all.

How does it work?

The GoogleSharing system is a custom proxy with a Firefox Add-on.

The proxy

The proxy generates a pool of GoogleSharing “identities,” each containing a cookie issued by Google and an arbitrary User-Agent for one of several browsers.

The add-on

The Firefox add-on watches for requests to Google services from your browser… and will transparently redirect them to a GoogleSharing proxy. There your request is stripped of identifying information and replaced with a GoogleSharing identity. Then this request is forwarded to Google, and the response is proxied back to you.

If your next search is given a different identity,

the one you were using before will be assigned to someone else. GoogleSharing mixes the requests of many users together. Google is unable to tell what comes from whom.

Use Google search, images, maps, products, news, etc. without tracking of your by IP address, cookie, or identifying HTTP headers.

Only your Google traffic is redirected!

Does it work with encrypted.google.com (SSL)?

Yes.

Users-clients can route encrypted traffic through GoogleSharing to Google…client requests are anonymized by GoogleSharing, but the actual traffic that the GoogleSharing proxy sees is encrypted to Google, and cannot be monitored.

How effectively does it hide my identity and activity?

GoogleSharing is designed to give a level of anonymity such that Google is prevented from building a profile from your day-to-day activity. That’s it, no more. Use Tor if you need serious, all-around anonymity. This is not intended to be anything like Tor:

GoogleSharing is not designed for provably strong anonymity in the face of an adversary that is monitoring all communication across the internet.

What Google products are inaccessible?

…the GoogleSharing plugin will proxy traffic for all Google services that don’t require you to be logged in. It does not proxy Chat, GMail, Checkout, Sites, Docs or Reader.

But it doesn’t prevent you from using them either:

…you can continue to use these services with GoogleSharing enabled if you must — that traffic will just go directly to Google instead of passing through GoogleSharing.

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