Disconnect.Me With Collision for Chrome Shows How You Have No Privacy Online
Online privacy is a major issue today, when there are sites and services that follow you all around the Web without you even knowing it. We’re looking at you: Facebook, Twitter, Google and some other ones. At first, this may seems as an over-reaction, but ask yourselves: do you really want to share everything with your social graph?
Let’s be honest here, you don’t. There are some articles on the web you’ll like and share on your Facebook wall, but in some other cases, you’ll even open up the Incognito mode in your browser to hide your dirty, dirty browsing history. Disconnect.Me is a simple plugin for Google Chrome which will disconnect you from tracking services over the web and keep your privacy – private.
Privacy? What Privacy?
Any modern-day browser like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox has a “secret” browsing mode which, when closed and your browsing session is over, will delete the complete history, cookies, saved passwords and form inputs. The problem is – you can’t use that everyday. You want to surf the web normally, without loosing the data. Even that incognito mode won’t keep you safe from tracking sites.
Almost every site today has at least one Facebook social plugin so you can like an article, check out what your friends are reading etc. Every time you open up such a site, Facebook gets a “notification” that you just visited some site. What Facebook (or any other similar tracking site) does with this information is a mystery; they’ll probably use it to make you a better target for their ads. However, it’s pretty creepy, isn’t it?
A much worse scenario is with sites like The Guardian, where you don’t have to click anything on the site; just open the article and Facebook will leave a message on your wall saying that you’ve just read an article titled… who knows what.
Disconnect the Problem
Disconnect.Me steps is in a form of a add-on for Google Chrome. Get it free and install it. There are no settings so once you get it installed, you’ll be ready to use it. There isn’t much usage per se, so you’ll just have to start surfing. Go on, visit your favorite blog or news portal and the counter on the icon will begin to count something. Open it and you’ll see which social networks are tracking you on that site and in what quantity. Disconnect.Me will block all that tracking, so you won’t see Facebook Like buttons on sites or any other social media plugins. If you want to go a step further, you can install Collusion, a Chrome plugin which will graph out all the tracking sites and your browsing history. You’ll be amazed to see how many sites are watching your every online move. Check out how Collision works, it’s freaky:
[youtube width=”555″ height=”312″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP79Iwm0xbA[/youtube]
Now you can see how many sites have access to your data. To give you some context; think about how many sites you open up daily. Each of them has at least several social plugins, ad servers and visitor counters.
They all get a hold of your data even before the site loads completely. If you’re a privacy freak or you just want to take care of your online identity, Disconnect.Me will be one of the most precious add-ons you’ll ever install. Paired with Collision, you might get a bit more aware of how you don’t have any privacy on the Internet.
