I am peeved with the big internet companies logging my browsing habits and all that. Now - I know that one can go into settings and after struggling a bit, you can disable google/facebook/… logging you - but it requires significant vigilant work on the consumers and I am getting tired of it.
So - I would like an app - that acts as a screensaver on my PC, makes the big internet players believe it is me and visits random websites, does random searches for phrases in google, visits random facebook pages, clicks on random ads, … Basically - it fills up so much garbage in their data collection system that they cannot make good use of the data to profile me.
Yes there is, but darned if I can remember what it is called, but it puts a little monkey face at the bottom of your browser. A friend has it on his laptop. What it does is run random searches in the background using random words from the page you are on, like it might randomly search on Branson on the page about Branson as the stewardess and Branson where the country western stuff is.
Greasemonkey for Firefox puts a little monkey face at the bottom of your browser.
But what it does is allow you to install javascript that other people (possibly yourself) have written to add custom features to your browser. There probably is a greasemonkey script that does just what the OP asked, but a cursory search on their website couldn’t find it.
This goes part of the way by confusing random queries to various search engines continuously: ****TrackMeNot,****a Fx extension. Home page.
However your ISP will always know where you have been and stores this information for whatever period they can get away with ( by which I mean they don’t want to keep billions and trillions of records, but jurisdictions make them. So unless you use a proxy ( and I wouldn’t trust them enormously, HMA gave logs to the FBI a few years ago ) which I have not in case it slows my connection, there’s always a record.
I’d worry that they would randomly stumble on all sorts of sites that I really don’t want anyone to think I’m searching — kiddie porn; illegal drugs and downloads; DIY bomb-building instructions and meth recipes, etc.
This won’t have any negative impact on data collection, but will a) enrich the “big nternet companies” you seem determined to thwart through page views, ad clicks, etc., and b) could pretty quickly push you over the limits of your “unlimited” data plan.
The FF extension that disallows “following” seems like a better choice. You can get the same extension on the mobile FF browser. I use the mobile FF so I could block ads on my phone where they’re particularly intrusive, and found lots of other extensions that work seamlessly with it, too.