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April 18, 2013 11:15 am GMT

Disconnect 2 Brings More Privacy To Your Browser, Lets You Block 2K+ Sites From Tracking Your Activity Online

Screen shot 2013-04-18 at 3.10.07 AMWith the Era of Over-sharing and the Social Fire Hose upon us, the heft and value of privacy is changing — and, for better or worse, many argue that it’s diminishing. Perturbed by the access many companies (inconspicuously) have to our browsing history, former Googler Brian Kennish developed a Chrome Extension to address the browser privacy issue. Facebook Connect, as it was called then, disabled traffic from third-party sites to Facebook, while still allowing Average Internet Surfers like you and me to access Facebook. Thanks to the near-immediate success of the extension, Kennish left Google to focus on the project full-time, and soon launched Disconnect — to apply the same concept to other popular platforms like Google, Yahoo, Digg and Twitter. Disconnect quickly turned into a full-blown company, and Kennish recruited the help of another former Google engineer, Austin Chau, along with consumer rights advocate, Casey Oppenheim. The driving principle behind Disconnect, Kennish told us at the time, was to ensure that personal data remains under our own control and not that of corporations and to allow users “to control who does what with their data online.” With cybersecurity becoming a hot topic, CIPSA, the reintroduction of the Do Not Track Online Act, and the seemingly ever-present outrage over Facebook (and others) using our online data to target ads (even offline), the concern over privacy and security has only increased since Disconnect’s launch. So, this week, the startup released version 2.0 of its Chrome extension, significantly expanding its coverage of the sites we use most frequently (and its speed), in an effort to keep up with the increasing complexity and pervasiveness of the variety of stuff that can potentially infringe on our online privacy. Again, ask the founders and they’ll tell you that the Web today is littered with analytics, advertising, social widgets and the like that gum up the gears that make page load speeds hum, while quietly redirecting your personal browsing data to tracking companies. They believe that this stuff, in turn, increases your exposure to malware and other nefarious, Web-born attacks. And they’re not alone. Disconnect 2 updates the privacy extension so that it now allows users to visualize and block over 2,000 third-party sites and track what they do on the Web, which they claim is twice the number of tracking sites covered by other, similar apps. The founders have also optimized Disconnect for speed and,

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