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Web browsing metadata provides a lot of insight on person's habits. How can I reduce that insight? Is there something like "Detachment 2702" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon) plugin for browsers?

Some basic things adversary should not be able to do:

  • serve reliably relevant ads/product/youtube recomendations
  • discover when I arrive at home or go to bed
  • flag me for reading dissident articles and watching DIY video about gas masks
  • flag me as the user that hogs most traffic from my ISP
  • flag me for using VPN/TOR
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    Or this: http://security.stackexchange.com/q/2398/12 or this: http://security.stackexchange.com/q/857/12 or this http://security.stackexchange.com/q/16467/12 – Xander Jul 02 '13 at 16:59

2 Answers2

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You could also create a "traffic generator" that randomly browses all kinds of sites at all hours. It would need to do a full impersonation where it visited a page and pulled down all of the resources (css, javascript, images) and then followed links, etc.

A really good impersonator would browse at human-speed and develop habits such sites it likes to revisit or things it searches for.

Generate enough random traffic and your traffic should blend right in. It won't hide your behavior but it will make it difficult for it to attribute it to you.

u2702
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  • This sounds like what I'm looking for. So does such a thing exist right now? –  Jul 03 '13 at 09:28
  • Not that I'm aware of but I haven't really looked. There are lots of good libraries for web crawling that you could build upon. (Tor does this in a sense by blending everyone's traffic together, you may have to make sure you aren't leaking DNS requests though). – u2702 Jul 03 '13 at 15:53
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serve reliably relevant ads/product/youtube recomendations

Don't allow your browser to store cookies, use something like CCleaner after every browsing session and don't allow javascript to run check out noscript

discover when I arrive at home or go to bed

I personally cover the web camera that conveniently came built into my one laptop just in case. Also watch your habits, don't go to a particular site as soon as you get home and don't come home at the same time every day.

flag me for reading dissident articles and watching DIY video about gas masks

Using a VPN or TOR along with not using a personal account would work with this also make sure to scrub the metadata from any file you upload here is a good place to start looking into metadata removal.

flag me as the user that hogs most traffic from my ISP

flag me for using VPN/TOR

If you don't want your ISP to flag you for anything then don't do anything that could cause you to be flagged on YOUR internet connection. Use a public hot spot or a neighbors wireless connection (with permission of course :)).

Also on the VPN front while there are many VPN services out there. However it's plausible (probably not likely) for a site to compile a list of IP's that would come from that VPN provider. What you could do is rent a cloud server, setup your own VPN and use that.

You might also be interested in TailsOS it (supposedly) runs all internet traffic through tor and privoxy. If I really want to have an anonymous session I hookup to my VPN on my base machine then run Tails live in a VirtualBox.

Hope this helps

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Four_0h_Three
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