George Orwell might not have been referring to the internet in his seminal 1984 novel, but his vision is accurate enough. Today’s ‘Big Brother’ would probably be Google.

Enter Jamie Wilkinson and his ‘Google Alarm’ browser plugin. Convinced that Google’s out to get him, the member of copyleft group FAT Lab developed the plugin to sound an annoying alarm each time you send—willingly or not—information to Google.

According to Wilkinson, for every click you take, every website you stake, Google will be watching you. Well, most of them anyway. They do so through ‘tracking bugs’: Google Analytics, Google AdSense, API calls, and so on.

So with ‘Google Alarm’, a notification will pop up on the corner of your browser informing you whenever Google is getting its grubby hands on your personal info, followed by that horrendous alarm (it does come in a no-sound version, thank goodness).

The plugin is currently available for Firefox and—ironically enough—Chrome. If you’re serious about privacy, give ‘Google Alarm’ a spin; you’d probably find it impossible to trawl the net without activating the alarm anyway.

Watch it in action here:



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