byoogle

We saved you a click. :-) Disconnect blocks (2,000+ tracking sites) by default.

The number of requests in the dropdown menu should add up to the number of requests in the toolbar counter (we do group requests by company, which Ghostery doesn't do, so you will see less rows in Disconnect's UI if that's what you mean). Do you have a site where the two aren't equal?

Disqus is in the Content category, which isn't blocked by default (reason: users seem unhappy when we block content-y things like videos, photos, and comments by default). But you can still check the adjacent box to block Disqus (your settings are remembered on a per-site basis).

OpenX, otoh, should be in the Advertising category and be blocked by default as far as I know. Is there a site where this isn't the case?

I think this is a good analogy. I was involved with indie bands in the 90s and startups now (disclosure: I work on Disconnect, a Ghostery alternative) and have been saying how much the scenes are alike.

But the band - I mean, startup - has to take some responsibility. In this case, I think they have to take a lot of the responsibility. When you sell your startup to a company called Better Advertising (Evidon's name before switching), can you really be surprised when the company starts selling your users' data to advertisers?

Thanks! Good feedback.

The numbers indicate requests (as in HTTP requests) attempted by the tracking companies. Green (or checked) indicates the requests were blocked. Gray (or unchecked) indicates they were allowed.

We'll beef up the help doc (https://disconnect.me/d2/help) to clarify.

Ghostery claims 8 million users are opted in to "share" their data. From the informal polling I've done of Ghostery users (I work on an anti-tracking alternative called Disconnect), I believe less than 1 in 10 of those users know Ghostery is selling their browsing data to advertisers.

If Ghostery cared about being more transparent than the ad industry, they'd have to do a lot more than fix their FAQs. They should opt out all of the 8 million users who opted in without being told their data would be sold. Then Ghostery should re-onboard these users with accurate messaging. Quite frankly, Ghostery should also send checks to the 8 million users for all the money Ghostery made off their data.

Thanks. Disconnect currently has the biggest list of tracking sites of any app (well over 2,000 sites). And our filtering engine is written differently than other apps (no slow regexes). In practice, we benchmarked the 1,000 most popular sites and found they loaded an average of 27% faster with Disconnect than without. I've also done some informal benchmarks of other apps (I should do a more formal study at some point) and can say Disconnect accelerates pages quite a bit more than them.

Mozilla's review process is too sluggish for us right now since we're still making changes to Disconnect 2 quickly. When things are more stable, we'll probably submit to AMO.

Yeah, I think later this week. (We actually had a Coinbase implementation before we launched, which we decided to pull last minute because we thought there was a little too much Bitcoin and Coinbase uncertainty at the time.)

Opt in for what? They say to "share" your data with Ghostery, but what they do is sell your data to advertisers. Shouldn't an anti-tracking solution be more transparent than the problem?

Done :-):

https://disconnect.me/ https://github.com/disconnectme

I just mentioned Disconnect, but I make Disconnect. :-)

You should try the new Disconnect (Disconnect 2) which has a lot more features than Ghostery and is even rated higher by users than Ghostery is. We just launched Safari and Opera versions today (and are also available on Chrome and Firefox).

Isn't there a big difference between asking users to opt in to "share" their data with Ghostery (which is what Ghostery says) and asking users to opt in to have their data (what data, btw?) "sold" to advertisers (which is what Ghostery does)?

Ghostery claims that 45% of their users (8 million out of 18 million) are opted in to send Ghostery their browsing data. I wonder if even 1% of those users know their data is being sold to advertisers by Ghostery. I have trouble believing the solution to online tracking is even less transparent than the problem.

I work on an anti-tracking alternative called Disconnect. We do this crazy thing where we ask our users to pay for our product. Oh, and lots of people also already happen to think Disconnect is better than Ghostery: http://lifehacker.com/the-best-browser-extensions-that-prote.... :-)

Oh yeah, our original Firefox add-on was outsourced ... and I think kind of sucked. I learned not to do that (even though the devs were and are great).

Thanks a lot for the feedback on the new UI.

Breaking literally every tech blog would be way hard to do. :-)

We've gotten literally two bug reports about broken blogs of any sort in the last year (I just checked; and both are now fixed, btw), so I assume there aren't issues anymore. But if you experience any, let me know!

Lifehacker just did a comparison of popular privacy extensions and called Disconnect the best (over Ghostery and others): http://lifehacker.com/the-best-browser-extensions-that-prote...

Since I've never heard my entrepreneur friends say stuff like that about 500 Startups ;-) and it's probably too soon to rank accelerators on performance, I went looking for something more scientific. This evaluation is the best I could find -- 500 Startups is #10: http://tech.co/reports/startup-accelerator-report-2012

#2 at what? (Or did you mean: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=%232)

I think for almost all cases, there are simpler solutions:

* Use secure cookies (set the secure bit so these cookies are only sent over HTTPS) for authenticating on your HTTPS site

* Use a separate domain for embeds ("youtube-widgets.com" instead of "youtube.com" on third-party sites)

Disconnect blocks stuff, too. But if you unblock something (e.g., to see comments on TechCrunch), you shouldn't have to be exposed to session hijacking. That's why we added this feature.

IIRC, the default font sizing on iOS was weird without that rule. But I didn't realize we broke zooming. I did accessibility work in my last job, so I feel pretty dumb now. Will fix.

When you’re on first-party sites like Facebook and Google, the add-on isn’t meant to block anything. The blocking kicks in when you’re on third-party sites that otherwise send your browsing history to Facebook, Google, et al.

Give our new Firefox add-ons a try <https://disconnect.me/tools>; — I think they have our best extension UI, but I’d love to know what you think.

See my other reply to you.

On Firefox? We’ve been working on more obvious UI for Firefox, which isn’t in Disconnect yet but you can get in our newer add-ons (Facebook Disconnect, Google Disconnect, and Twitter Disconnect) now:

  https://disconnect.me/tools

Again, Google doesn’t let you delete your search or browsing history. I’d argue this is, by far, the most personal info they collect about you.

Google doesn’t even mention either in the two links you gave.

Google stores your search history for 18 months (http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/faq/) and your browsing history indefinitely (using ad cookies).

They do not offer to delete either (though they do give you some controls, which is way more than most other tracking services). Prove me wrong.