Your browsing history and online data maybe compromised and it’s about time you defended yourself from thirty-party sites. Information about you, your demographics, your behaviors and habits—all information you may think has little to no value—is valuable to companies or the government. Disconnect.me stops third-party sites from gathering your personal data.
You should be free to move about the Internet without anyone looking over your shoulder and without fear that your online activity might be analyzed, your searches scrutinzed, or your security compromised.
The government and businesses are both scrambling to collect as much information as they can about you, but Disconnect.me wants to give you the option to control who gets access to your information. While the government uses the information they collect on social media to hunt and catch criminals (that may not so bad, right?), businesses wants to sell targeted products to you to make it easier to get your attention.
There are lots of apps, browser extensions and add-ons that also stops third parties from tracking your movements, blocks ads and enforce good habits and disconnect is one of the best out there. Disconnect.me,available for Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer and Safari prevents Facebook, Google, and Twitter from tracking your online activities and collecting data about you.
How Disconnect works
An installed Disconnect extension gives you the option to block and unblock sites tracking you. The toolbar button shows you the total number of tracking requests on every page you go to. Click the button to see and block or unblock the requests. The dropdown shows you the number of tracking requests by company. Green means the requests are blocked. Gray means they’re unblocked. Click any icon or checkbox to block or unblock requests.
The latest version of Disconnect also promises to make web browsing faster by reducing bandwidth usage by 17%, and loading pages 27% faster.
Disconnect.me was co-founded by an ex-Googler to help you monitor and block more than 2,000 websites from collecting your data online. Brian Kennish spent more than a decade building the software that allows companies to track your data online. He developed ad servers for Double Click in the early 2000s, and then joined Google where he worked on the search giant’s first AdWords API.
In an interview with Mashable, Brian said “The vast majority of users don’t even know that this stuff is going on, and certainly don’t know how their data is being used,” Kinnesh said, adding that he believes the best person to solve this problem would be someone who helped create it — someone like himself. “In a way, I feel like these tools had to come from an insider.”
