Post by mikkh on Oct 31, 2013 2:29:53 GMT
I've never been that paranoid about such things, but I bought 'Web User' today as a cheap read for a train journey
and that was one of the first articles I read. Several were mentioned but as one appeared to be far superior to the others and indeed won the coveted 'Webuser Gold Award' (!), that's the one I'm going to discuss.
It's called Disconnect and apparently it recognises 2000+ tracking sites and stamps on them - claiming to save you 17% bandwidth and improve loading speed by up to 27% in the process
This is all very nice in theory, but does it work seamlessly without you noticing it doing it's bit of magic in the background? On the whole, yes it does - but I didn't notice any particular speed increase myself. I've only had it installed for a few hours though and only swapped sites a couple of times, so maybe I'll notice it more over the coming days.
On the whole I said earlier, but there was one minor problem I encountered when checking my bank online. It didn't load basically which made me wonder why my bank would be tracking me and how I get to view it. Clicking the D icon at the top of the browser, I noticed there was a 'whitelist site' option available, so I used that, pressed F5 to refresh and there was my normal login screen.
There's also a secure wi-fi option, which is handy for laptops and other mobile devices
www.disconnect.me
It works for Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari but there is no option for the increasingly unpopular IE which has less than 20% of the market now.
if you're worried about online privacy, give it a go
The 'pay what you want' guilt trip didn't work on me, mostly because I'm not convinced it's worth anything yet, but this could turn out to be a nice addition to online safety and a bit more reassurance for those who worry about these things
and that was one of the first articles I read. Several were mentioned but as one appeared to be far superior to the others and indeed won the coveted 'Webuser Gold Award' (!), that's the one I'm going to discuss.
It's called Disconnect and apparently it recognises 2000+ tracking sites and stamps on them - claiming to save you 17% bandwidth and improve loading speed by up to 27% in the process
This is all very nice in theory, but does it work seamlessly without you noticing it doing it's bit of magic in the background? On the whole, yes it does - but I didn't notice any particular speed increase myself. I've only had it installed for a few hours though and only swapped sites a couple of times, so maybe I'll notice it more over the coming days.
On the whole I said earlier, but there was one minor problem I encountered when checking my bank online. It didn't load basically which made me wonder why my bank would be tracking me and how I get to view it. Clicking the D icon at the top of the browser, I noticed there was a 'whitelist site' option available, so I used that, pressed F5 to refresh and there was my normal login screen.
There's also a secure wi-fi option, which is handy for laptops and other mobile devices
www.disconnect.me
It works for Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari but there is no option for the increasingly unpopular IE which has less than 20% of the market now.
if you're worried about online privacy, give it a go
The 'pay what you want' guilt trip didn't work on me, mostly because I'm not convinced it's worth anything yet, but this could turn out to be a nice addition to online safety and a bit more reassurance for those who worry about these things
