Taking Control Of Your Personal Info With Disconnect.Me
Once it’s online, it stays online, or so “they” say. But it is kinda true. Once you go viral or leave your digital footprint somewhere on the Internet, it is hard to erase it from people’s minds, and even harder from servers’ memory. Being anonymous is a thing that only Banksy can keep up these days. It can be a good and a bad thing, but what is annoying is tracking. Yes, that can be helpful sometimes, but it can drag a lot of unwanted consequences and very often annoying ads. To help you keep your browsing history (and other things) to yourself, here is Disconnect.Me.
Keep Your Footprint to Yourself
In the age of oversharing, it is almost sensationally surprising that an ex-Google employee has developed an award-winning, open-source, user-friendly privacy and security software. That is what it is today, but it all started when Brian Kennish created a Chrome extension called Facebook Disconnect in late 2010. It disabled the traffic from third-party sites while allowing you to browse Facebook. Extension was so popular that Brian left Google to focus on his new software. Short after that, Disconnect was born and it broadened its services to Google, Twitter, Yahoo and others.
The motto of the Disconnect is that the data belongs to people, not corporations. Very often, tracking is done without users knowing or noticing. Companies track, analyse and sell browsing and searching history because they can. To be honest, we users are almost always blindly agreeing to Terms and Conditions, but this is not the question of legality, but morality. Global Big Brother already feels too real, so why don’t we take it down a notch?
Profit? Yes. Priority? No.
So far, they have raised more than $3.5M of investments, but they are not profit organized. Disconnect is designated as a B corporation, meaning that it is a semi-charitable organization. With that the team, that includes members like consumer rights attorney and ex-NSA employee, they can spend more time on collaboration with non-profits, consumer education and petition drives. They want to benefit their shareholders and the general public and with people that were insiders on the other side of the privacy war, we are confident that they know what they are doing.
Disconnect blocks around 2,000 third-party sites and it shows you in real-time what exactly do they block. It will visually show you how they track your data. The best part is that it is a pay-as-you-want software. It will not only protect and tell you who is doing what, but it will also speed up your browsing. Every widget, app or ad slows down your page loading, so not only you are going to have more private and secure browsing, it is going to be faster. Pages use 17% less bandwidth an as a result, they load 27% faster.
What about Kids?
At this point, they have over 1 million users of the app and browser extensions per week. Version 2.0 launched last year and they also launched app specifically made for children (and their parents). Disconnect Kids, for now only available for iOS, was built with simplicity in mind. It teaches how online tracking and marketing works, and truth to be told, it is an education that is necessary, but lacking these days.
Being tracked is something that we don’t want in real life, so why should we allow it online? Disconnect.Me helps you to regain your independency and anonymity in a understandable way, and it allows you to pay as much as you can or want. So download it and regain you being you and not you being what others presume you should be online.
