TrackMeNot-so-good-after-all

TrackMeNot is a Firefox plugin with laudable intentions - protecting your privacy. By issuing a customizable stream of random search queries on its users' behalf, TrackMeNot surmises that enough search noise will prevent its users' true query profiles from being discerned. However, we find that clustering queries by semantic relatedness allows us to disentangle a nontrivial subset of true user queries from TrackMeNot issued noise.

[1]  Massimo Barbaro,et al.  A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No , 2006 .

[2]  Ali S. Hadi,et al.  Finding Groups in Data: An Introduction to Chster Analysis , 1991 .

[3]  Paul M. B. Vitányi,et al.  The Google Similarity Distance , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.