Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing is reporting on UW CSE grad student Franzi Roesner‘s latest project, ShareMeNot. Cory writes: “[ShareMeNot is] a Firefox Add-On that defangs social media buttons like the Facebook ‘Like’ button (and others) so that they don’t transmit any information about your browsing habits to these services until (and unless) you click on them. That means that merely visiting a page with a Like or a Tweet or a +1 button (like this one) doesn’t generate a data-trail for the companies that operate those services, but you still get the benefit of the buttons, that is, if you click them, they still work. Smart.”
Also involved are UW CSE faculty members Yoshi Kohno and David Wetherall.