At Disconnect, we’ve been focused solely on protecting privacy for more than a decade. Our pioneering technology and solutions are proven and trusted by partners like Microsoft and Mozilla as well as millions of users. While security and privacy are not the same, privacy vulnerabilities absolutely impact your security posture.
+750 million Monthly active users currently protected by Disconnect.
44
trillion Tracking requests blocked per year by our protection.
2.4x How much faster web pages and apps load with our protection.
+750 million Users currently protected by Disconnect.
44
trillion Tracking requests blocked per year by our protection.
2.4x How much faster web pages and apps load with our protection.
It’s the middle of the night. Do you know who your iPhone is talking to? [Disconnect partnered with The Washington Post to research iOS tracking]“In a single week, I encountered over 5,400 trackers, mostly in apps . . . According to privacy firm Disconnect, which helped test my iPhone, those unwanted trackers would have spewed out 1.5 gigabytes of data over the span of a month. 'This is your data. Why should it even leave your phone? Why should it be collected by someone when you don’t know what they’re going to do with it?' says Patrick Jackson, a former National Security Agency researcher who is chief technology officer for Disconnect. “I know the value of data, and I don’t want mine in any hands where it doesn’t need to be,' he told me. In a world of data brokers, Jackson is the data breaker. He developed an app called Privacy Pro that identifies and blocks many trackers. If you’re a little bit techie, I recommend trying the free iOS version to glimpse the secret life of your iPhone.”
Read the article Many payment apps share or sell user data.Casey Oppenheim, co-founder and CEO of Disconnect, noted, “People using these apps have no reason to expect that when they send money, there are tracking companies they’ve never heard of collecting super-personal data, like their home address (exact GPS location) and the names of their associates.” For example, you may trust PayPal to handle your data, but when it shares that data with a third party you’ve never heard of and have no direct relationship with, you don’t get much of a say in the matter—if you even realize that’s happening at all. To fully understand the scale of where and how your data is shared, you’d have to look through the third party’s terms of use and privacy policy. “And there is a daisy chain to this invisible tracking,” Oppenheim added. “Each tracking company that collects your info may be able to retain, use, and share that data according to their policies without your knowledge or consent.”
Read the article Disconnect chosen best privacy toolIn the end, we picked Disconnect as our favorite tool because it was the easiest to understand. It organizes the types of tracking requests it is blocking into different categories: advertising, analytics, social media and content. Mr. Grossman of WhiteHat Security also tested tracking blockers and chose Disconnect for similar reasons.
February 18, 2016
Read the articleFor those who would prefer not to block ads, there are tracker blockers as well — my favorite is Disconnect.
April 5, 2017
Read the articleMy favorite tracker blocker for desktop and mobile systems is Disconnect.me.
August 15, 2018
Read the articleMy favorite tracker blocker for desktop systems is Disconnect.me.
May 10, 2021
Read the article Disconnect Helped Check iPhone Apps—This Is How They’re Tracking YouWe also used Disconnect’s Privacy Pro SmartVPN app to analyze traffic on 150 of the 250 apps, and we found that they shared data across 44 different third-party services that Disconnect defines as trackers, averaging between two and three third-party services per app.
One app does not list anything on its Data Used to Track You label but appears to communicate with two potential trackers which can be configured to fit Apple’s definition of not tracking. [The App's] developer didn’t respond to our request for comment or an explanation of how it uses those tools. Overall, we found that 18 weather apps shared data with an average of four third-party companies listed as trackers by Disconnect.
Read the article Think you’re anonymous online? A third of popular websites are ‘fingerprinting’ you.I asked Patrick Jackson, chief technology officer of privacy software company Disconnect, to test for signs of fingerprinting on the 500 most popular websites used by Americans. He revealed what these sites hide in their code and do on our computers that we don’t get to see on our screens. “Fingerprinting is designed to be user-hostile,” said Jackson. “It even takes the fact that you don’t want to be tracked as a parameter to make your fingerprint more unique. Data collected today can be used against us today, tomorrow or even 10 years from now,” says Jackson, who used to work for the National Security Agency. “Your browsing history, the apps you use and the data you give companies can lead to voter manipulation, targeted behavior modification, and further aids the mass surveillance of our activities on and offline.”
Read the articleRetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
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