LostintheCrowd helps you camouflage your search data using your browser cookie.

By Pandia Guest Writer Lars Våge

A couple of weeks ago an AOL employee released search data for some 650.000 users for research purposes. Or, that was at least the idea. Instead the data found its way to an open web site and bloggers started to circulate the info. This caused quite some consternation as it turned out to be possible to some extent to track who had done which searches.

The end result was that three AOL employees had to leave the company according to AP.

In the wake of this PR disaster the new web service LostintheCrowd.org offers to anonymize your AOL, Google, Ask, MSN Search and Yahoo! searches.

All you have to do is to supply LostintheCrowd a copy of the cookie the search engine is using to keep track of your searches (a cookie is a small text file that the search engine keeps on your computer). LostintheCrowd then regularly searches the Web using this cookie developing a lot of random information or “noise” that drowns out your real searches. The data related to your cookie therefore demonstrate general or average interests.

At LostintheCrowd you first select the search engine you want to use from a menu. You are then asked to bookmark a link that is generated by the service by dragging the link to your toolbar or by right clicking on the link and saving it as a bookmark.

When this is done you go to the selected search engine home page and click on the relevant LostintheCrowd bookmark. You will then get a message “You Are Now Lost in MSN’s Crowd� or something similar.

This is a little cumbersome but much easier than using anonymizing solutions like Privoxy orTor. Privoxy and Tor will make you totally invisible, but by using LostintheCrowd you avoid loosing surfing speed.

LostintheCrowd is launched by Unspam Technologies in Utah, USA.

By the way: Most browsers let you delete cookies.

LostintheCrowd.org Keeps Search Engines Guessing (press release)