Started as a side project by then-Googler Brian Kennish back in 2010 to cut out ad tracking during a person\u2019s Facebook browsing session, Disconnect has gone on to raise funding (twice), to work on multiple browsers and sites, and create apps for specific users (e.g., kids), and take on more engineers, including two more from Google and one from the NSA. With its apps now used by 1 million people every week, Disconnect is now tackling the most popular way that people discover content online today: search engines. Today, the company is launching Disconnect Search, an extension for Chrome and Firefox browsers that lets users searching on Google, Bing and Yahoo, as well as Blekko and DuckDuckGo, remain private while doing so.<\/p>\n
The extension works both on the search portals\u2019 main sites, as well as through a browser\u2019s omnibox (in the case of Firefox) or browser bar (in the case of Chrome). (The \u201csearch from everywhere\u201d feature is still in beta.) Disconnect says that it has applied for patents to protect the proprietary way in which it does this.<\/p>\n
Casey Oppenheim, the former consumer rights attorney who is the co-founder of Disconnect with Kennish, points out that search engines, partly by virtue of being a portal to everything else, are often some of the most invasive when it comes to a user\u2019s privacy. \u201cYour searches are anything but private,\u201d he noted in a statement. \u201cSearch engines, and even websites and Internet service providers, can save your searches and connect them to your real name through your user accounts.\u201d Indeed, if you\u2019ve been logged in to your Gmail or another Google service and then visited Google.com, you\u2019ll know exactly how this works.<\/p>\n
Somewhat more alarmingly, this happens even when you\u2019re not logged in to another service, notes Patrick Jackson, the ex-NSA engineer who is now CTO of Disconnect (he also was behind the neat kids app Disconnect launched in August). \u201cEven if you never log in to an account, search engines and many websites typically save your searches and connect them to an IP address, which can allow companies to uniquely identify your computer.\u201d A technique, I guess, an NSA engineer would be all too familiar with.<\/p>\n
Disconnect Search works along four channels, the company says, with some of the method taking a hat tip from VPN tunnelling services that mask your IP address:<\/p>\n
\u2013 Search queries are routed through Disconnect\u2019s servers, \u201cwhich makes the queries look like they\u2019re coming from Disconnect instead of a specific user\u2019s computer,\u201d the company says.<\/p>\n
\u2013 As a result, search engines are prevented (blocked) from passing keywords to the sites that are visited from search results pages.<\/p>\n
\u2013 All queries are encrypted, which prevents ISPs from seeing them.<\/p>\n
\u2013 And on top of this, Disconnect doesn\u2019t log any keywords, personal information, or IP addresses after it routes your query to its own servers.<\/p>\n