On the internet, pretty much everyone knows what you're doing.  Web site operators can use tracking cookies to help build up a profile of you, based on what sites you visit and what you search for.  International security agencies can use that information too, to build up profiles of users and to invade your privacy.

Attempting to remain anonymous online can be difficult, so it's fascinating to see that a browser add-in for Firefox takes a novel approach in its attempt to solve the problem.  Instead of trying to hide what you search for online, Track Me Not (TMN) automatically initiates lots of random searches from your PC, among the leading search engines, in a bid to devalue the quality of the information that external agencies may be using to build a profile of you.

Installing the add-on is easy.  Just head to https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/trackmenot/ from within your Firefox browser.  The software is free to use.  Once installed, there's a handful of options that you can configure, including which search engines it contacts on your behalf and how many queries it submits.  Then you just on with your life as normal, and TMN works away in the background.

Perhaps most interesting of all, you can opt to choose whether or not the searches generated by TMN include words and phrases which are said to be on the official list of subjects that is monitored by the US Department of Homeland Security!