Re: [tor-talk] Google as default search engine revisited

[Maxim Kammerer <mk@xxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 21:47, Eitan Adler <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> While Google does have less than ideal privacy practices they are
> largely mitigated by the other anonymity preserving measures taken in
> TBB.

I am referring to something specific: the redirection URL that Google
puts in its search results pages in order to track which results
people click on.

> In fact the entire point of TBB is to prevent remote sites like
> Google from being able to determine anything useful from the data
> being sent.

Does Tor Browser prevent Google from determining which sites Tor
Browser users go to from search result pages (as opposed to which
search queries they execute)? That is, there are relevant addons for
removing the tracking — does Tor Browser include them?

Moreover, if I would take a guess about one company doing a
state-of-the-art user fingerprinting (i.e., one that can bypass the
measures taken in TBB), that company would be Google.

> - Google is better in many (most?) cases such that the majority of
> people prefer using Google

Again, are there any statistics w.r.t. users' trade-off preferences of
privacy vs. search engine quality, that have not been invented on the
spot?

> - Every patch against Firefox is another thing to maintain. While it
> may seem simple, this has non-trivial cost. Every time Firefox changes
> you have to check each and every patch you have and potentially update
> it.

Did you actually look in Tor Browser source code? I did examine the
older Torbutton code, and specifying a different search engine would
not be a maintenance burden.

-- 
Maxim Kammerer
Liberté Linux (discussion / support: http://dee.su/liberte-contribute)
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