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by obiwanpallav1 1760 days ago
Thanks for the info!

One question: Let's assume that I've added Firefox containers and instructed it to open every tab in a new container. If I open a link from the Google search result in a new tab(that is inside a new container) then can Google still trace the flow because the opened links are from Google and not the actual search result and it may contain the tracking info?

2 comments

You should do 2 things to mitigate this:

1) Install ClearURLs. This addon strips tracking identifiers from URLs. If you hover a google search link you'll see it doesn't direct to you to website.com it directs you to google.com which then forwards you to the site you clicked without this addon

2) Configure Temporary Containers to make a new container for every different subdomain or domain. This way, if you click a link from google search, regardless of using ClearURLs, a new container spawns for any domain/subdomain that does not match (ex: click netflix.com from google and TemporaryContainers identifies this and spawns a second tab for netflix). This makes some things impossible, like SSO, so configuring it properly can be tricky. You might be able to configure it such that only links clicked from google.com spawn a new container and those that redirect to sso sites don't, but I haven't done this. You can always open a private window where the context is shared (temporary containers don't work in private) if you need SSO.

Obviously there's more you have to do to be even safer because with pings on by default and js enabled on google, they can still see you clicked a link. Also, with Google Analytics (GA), they can infer someone searching "x" and then "another user" from the same IP fetches "x" GA tracking scripts a second later is the same person. The list goes on and Google really likes tracking people, so it's very difficult to mitigate. The first and most important thing you can do is GET OFF CHROME/EDGE!

Yes. There are addons that degooglify the links though. It's such an evil practice they've introduced.
Whether it's evil or not depends on how it's used. Suppose that the top result for some common search is poor, but the second one is better, and this is visible to most users from the search result page. Everyone clicks link #2, hardly anyone clicks #1. That is valuable feedback and the search engine developer then knows that there's something wrong with the first result, and this can be determined without keeping any information on the original user. Often this happens when some clever SEO has caused the search engine to give a high rank to some stupid site.