While this is somewhat off-topic, it is a subject of deep concern for me. I think there are enough smart people here to be able to at least put a dent in this problem.
For a variety of reasons, I do not wish to be tracked and have corporations and governments accumulate a dossier on my searches, emails and web activity. Let's assume that there is a valid reason to maintain some level of privacy and avoid the 'I have nothing to hide, do you' or 'There is nothing to do, they will get you anyway' discussion.
First line of defense is to beef up browser security. Firefox with Ghostery, self-destructing cookies and NoScript (even though I often turn it off as it interferes with too many sites) should theoretically be enough, but in practice, the browser fingerprinting information is enough to identify me. My broser is completely unique in the panopticlick database of over 3 million users
https://panopticlick.eff.org/.
Avoiding the obvious sites like g**gle is not a solution. More then half websites (probably closer to 100%) out there use some form of advertising, tracking cookies, website statistics, JavaScript libraries and other junk that connects my browser directly to g**gle.
TOR network actually resolves many of these issues, but it's way too slow, and possibly draws even more attention to me. I have every reason to suspect that many TOR nodes are compromised anyway. A more general-purpose proxy is not a bad idea, but I can't reasonably trust just one of them enough, and they are pretty inconsistent (not all web pages go through, etc).
The main culprit is that each connection from my browser sends an ungodly amount of information to the server, including browser ID and version information, screen resolution, lists of extensions, etc. As I see it, the only way to deal with it is some kind of broser extension that randomly selects from a list of common strings, but not just for the browser ID, but all other parameters.
Does anyone know of an existing extension that does that kind of rotation? Does something like greasemonkey allow you to modify these string continuously while browsing? Do you have an alternate solution?