One of the major repercussions from Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA and GCHQ, is that people are finally starting to wake up to the fact that everything they do is tracked online. Everything. And Disconnect.me is looking to give you a little privacy back.
From ISPs like BT teaming up with behavioural tracking firm Phorm, mobile networks in the US selling subscriber location information, or the more traditional web properties and advertising networks tracking users to make advertising more relevant and more valuable – everyone is tracking you online. Yes, the NSA or GCHQ may be reading your emails or monitoring the sites you visit as well, but most of the data is collected for marketing purposes by private companies.
The axiom for using anything free online, is that “you are the product” being sold, but with modern tracking that is often true whether the service is funded by advertising or not – Amazon does a fair amount of tracking as well and they are still an ecommerce site at heart.
All this tracking is not necessarily an issue – as long as we know when and how we are being tracked, and how to avoid that tracking when we are doing something we don;t want left in our records – some people do actually use “private browsing” to search for presents for loved ones, not just for porn.
Even with private browsing enabled, some companies will still be tracking what you’re doing – matching your IP address to their other records to keep tabs on your activities. So how can you avoid this? Browser Add-on Disconnect.me lets you use the web leaving as little a trace as possible – blocking around 2000 tracking sites and services, and encrypting your data.
Disconnect.me say that pages load about 17% faster, but even if they loaded a little slower it would still be worth installing. This isn’t like TOR, the onion network that offers relative anonymity – you are not anonymous, but just not under constant scrutiny of marketers looking for the best ways to sell you stuff you don’t need.