Comment Re:Poison the well (Score 3, Insightful) 136
I actually suggested this directly to EFF a year or two ago. Basically have some extension that lowers the signal-to-noise ratio to the point where you can't find the signal. There are problems with this approach, though. You would need to trigger a lot of extra network traffic to hide your true (intended) actions. Also, if you want to hide all searches/traffic, you'd have to have your extension do a lot of fake pr0n traffic, too. Would everyone want an extension that does that? And finally, there are lots of heuristics that can be used to sort out the real traffic from the fake "chaff" traffic... how you click on the links, how long you are on the pages, how you interact with the pages, etc.
But I agree... I wish there was some automated way to poison this well and make it useless for trackers.
The bottom line is that we need a better way to pay for the web content we all consume. Micropayments? Google Contributor is interesting. Advertising is ruining the experience, causing tons of unnecessary and unwanted web traffic, and is becoming ineffective with the rise of ad blockers. As long as everyone wants everything to be "free", we're going to have this tracking problem.
