Some Google employees defect, then rebel | Hacker News Reader

Some Google employees defect, then rebel

cnn.com

49 pointscitizenkeys11 comments

I had heard of facebook disconnect, but not of his newer chrome extension simply called "disconnect":

http://www.disconnectere.com/

If you’re a typical web user, you’re unintentionally sending your browsing and search history with your name and other personal information to third parties and search engines whenever you’re online.

Take control of the data you share with Disconnect!

From the developer of the top-10-rated Facebook Disconnect extension, Disconnect lets you:

• Disable tracking by third parties like Digg, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Yahoo, without requiring any setup or significantly degrading the usability of the web.

• Truly depersonalize searches on search engines like Google and Yahoo (by blocking identifying cookies not just changing the appearance of results pages), while staying logged into other services — e.g., so you can search anonymously on Google and access iGoogle at once.

• See how many resource and cookie requests are blocked, in real time.

• Easily unblock services, by clicking the toolbar button then services (and reloading current pages) — e.g., so you can play games on Facebook.

One of the most useful features in Firefox is the cookie policy to accept all first-party cookies but throw them away when you close Firefox except for certain sites you've whitelisted. This allows you to stay logged into HN for example but discard all Facebook, Google, and other cookies.

Chrome currently only lets you throw away all cookies when you close it and doesn't offer the ability to whitelist domains. It sounds like this might bring in the missing functionality.

Anything like this for Safari? All I could find is http://www.orbicule.com/incognito/

edit: Ghostery (mentioned elsewhere in the thread) works with Safari. http://www.ghostery.com/download

"To name a few practices, Google can track search queries over time, target ads to its Gmail users based on the contents of e-mails, and use a person's location data to determine which shops' ads it will show."

Not only are they common knowledge (not just in the tech community but even known by people such as my mother, who's extent of computer abilities is being able to use Skype/Gmail/Google), but it's often easy to notice even with no technical knowledge at all, just by looking at what the adverts actually are. Seems odd, even if he never worked directly in that area, or cared much about privacy, that he never knew that kind of stuff.

(Or possible he's talking on levels way and above, and the writer of the article was just listing the most basic examples for readers.)

That was a good article. I just installed both Disconnect and Facebook Disconnect on Chrome, which I mostly use. I enabled Google text adds but blocked everything else.

I would like the Internet to evolve as both a free source of information and also as a platform for great commercial products like Netflix streaming movies, Hulu Plus, etc.

For information blocking to not affect the web experience, enough people need to be willing to donate money if they choose to do so. For example, Salon.com runs interesting articles and I have made small donations over the years (and one earlier today).

look at Ghostery - works with crome, FF etc.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw

Just install EasyPrivacy [1] and Fanboy Annoyances [2] for Adblock Plus.

[1] http://easylist.adblockplus.org/

[2] http://www.fanboy.co.nz/

i get a kick out of these multi-million dollar packages that are strikingly similar to the signing bonuses that professional athletes receive. it's about time professional startup-ers get the same treatment. we're stimulating the economy as much as anybody.

I just installed Disconnect on Chrome. I thought this was funny: (but not surpising)

Mashable.com - 48 blocked requests

I have no idea how that site even loads today with that much "crap" on it's site.

The article doesn’t lack in sensationalism, and very much inline with the recent Internet scare stories running in major publications, one could argue about the motives of these newspapers in trying to demonize online advertising as it’s arguably hurting their bottom line.

Privacy is important but we need to keep things in prospective, ads are propelling a huge wave of innovation and a huge industry. The reasonable way to preserve the rights of users is to grand them control over their data, and not just demonize ads altogether.

I personally prefer relevant (targeted) ads. Online ads are also measurable and such are fairer to the advertiser than a hail-merry print ad.

This aversion towards smart ads seems a bit anti-progressive, it's obvious that personalization in devices, media and of course the advertising to monetize the ecosystem is the logical evolution of consumer technology.

And It’s not just a case of paying with ‘privacy’ instead of money, many of the webservices available today won’t exist unless they are free, and are used by many people which their usage patterns are collected as feedback.

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