The old sporting term of a good offence being a good defence seems to work in the world of privacy protection. A new Firefox extension, TrackMeNot, that helps protect your online privacy works by creating more data which helps confuse the search engines thereby creating a new type of privacy protection.
Search engines like, Google, AOL, MSN and Yahoo have been logging user search activities and creating individual search profiles. All the companies involved have backed up the storage of the data by saying its used for internal purposes, ie they use it to help refine the search process. Fair point.
The TrackMeNot extension does not try to encrypt your data. Instead it generates even more data that is submitted to the search engines so your profile is somewhat hidden.
You can find out more about the product and read all the technical aspects at the TrackMeNot website.