For those of you who are concerned about the government–or anyone else–profiling you based on your web-surfing habits, here’s Paranoid Browsing, a new Chrome extension that may throw big brother off your trail. It works by opening a tab in the background that randomly browses through the internet, jamming your history with sites you didn’t actively visit. The idea is that anyone looking to learn about you by your browser history will have a difficult time knowing what matters and what doesn’t.
Ben West, creator of the extension, explains.
When activated, PB will open a tab and start browsing the Internet at one of a configured set of pages. It will proceed to click on links in each page at random, pausing for various amounts of time as though it were reading each document. After reaching a certain browsing depth, it will restart this process, choosing another top-level page at random. By repeating this many times, your browsing history will become dominated by the false profile generated by PB, and your actual preferences will be hidden.
