Should We Be Disconnected?

In our ever shrinking world we are "connected" more now than at any point in history. We can log onto the Internet and search for information about almost anything we want. With one caveat. We are being watched. Everything we search is being tracked and recorded. Not just by the government, which I am totally fine with by the way. They can watch my boring, nerdy Internet habits all they want. Anyway, not just by the government but by anyone trying to make a buck, which turns out to be quite a few people.

If you are a dedicated disciple of Ron Swanson you would consider all this tracking to be a huge invasion of privacy and are looking to get off the grid. Now if you can't get off the grid completely and still have Internet duties to attend to there are options for you. Disconnect is a service that helps Internet users "visualize and block the invisible websites that track you".



 

Ron Swanson getting disconnected

Disconnect started out in 2010 as a service for blocking ad tracking on Facebook but has since grown to block tracking on several web browsers, namely Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox with Internet Explorer soon to come. They also have apps for mobile devices but are limited to those with iOS.

 

 

 

What they are most excited about is the service they have just released for search engines. Disconnect Search is an extension( only for Chrome and Firefox browsers at the moment) that lets users searching on Google, Bing and Yahoo, as well as Blekko and DuckDuckGo, remain private while doing so.

 

While Disconnect is not the first service of it's kind, it does seem to have quite a bit of momentum. They say that as of today that over 1 Million people use there service every week. Even though this service is not going to get you around PRISM, I think that the causal effect will be that many people will want to control at least a little bit of what remains of their Internet privacy.

 

What impact is this kind of service going to have on SEO and other business related Internet activities? If it grows big enough I think this could have a significant impact. I'm sure there are people at Google right now working on ways to get around these types of services but it seems, that as of now, the battle is on.