How-To Block Web Services from Tracking Your Browsing Activities
It’s no secret that what you do on the internet is tracked and utilized for better marketing. Your online activities such as the web pages you visit and your search queries are collected by a variety of third parties including Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Digg and Twitter to name a few.
This collected information has a lot of potential for media and marketing companies as valuable research material. Blocking a third party tracker is possible, by cutting them off at the browser level. This is done in the form of browser extensions that cater to a particular or a set of browsers. Most extensions only focus on blocking a single third party such as Facebook or Google.
Today we’re going to be reviewingDisconnect, a browser extension for Chrome (and Rockmelt, based on the same Chromium platform). Developed by ex-Googler Brian Kennish, this simple browser extension has a lot of great features packed in.
This collected information has a lot of potential for media and marketing companies as valuable research material. Blocking a third party tracker is possible, by cutting them off at the browser level. This is done in the form of browser extensions that cater to a particular or a set of browsers. Most extensions only focus on blocking a single third party such as Facebook or Google.
Today we’re going to be reviewingDisconnect, a browser extension for Chrome (and Rockmelt, based on the same Chromium platform). Developed by ex-Googler Brian Kennish, this simple browser extension has a lot of great features packed in.
Starting off with just a Facebook Disconnect extension, Kennish has now developed Disconnect to incorporate the following features:
- It disables third party tracking from sites like Digg, Facebook, Twitter, Google and Yahoo. At the same time, there’s not much change as far as usability is concerned.
- Depersonalizes searches on Google, Yahoo and more, even when you’re logged in.
- Displays the number of cookie and resource requests that have been blocked.
- You can unblock services whenever required in order to access certain applications.
Right click the icon to disable the extension.
You can also click on each service to toggle between blocking and unblocking that particular one on all websites. It’s a simple extension with great benefits.
Disconnect is available for download on the Google Chrome Extensions Gallery, click here.
Disconnect is available for download on the Google Chrome Extensions Gallery, click here.
