Google Engineer Builds Facebook Disconnect

Wednesday, October 20th, 2010

Alexia Tsotsis works for TechCrunch as a writer. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the Media industry. After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles... → Learn More

Tired of the endless unsolicited entreaties to “Connect via Facebook” as you surf the web? Excited for Y Connect and want to keep a clean palate beforehand? Scared about Facebook not necessarily having your best interests at heart when it comes to privacy?

In any case, Google engineer Brian Kennish, inspired by the most recent Facebook privacy and data debacles, has decided to create “Facebook Disconnect” i.e. a Google Chrome extension that obliterates all Facebook Connect functionality and all traffic from third party sites to Facebook servers if one searches the web through Chrome. (You can try it out here)

Facebook Disconnect will “presumably” prevent the sending of data back to Facebook across the one million sites that use the Facebook Connect service. So far the ones I’ve tested it on (ehem, Huffington Post) seem to be kosher as I no longer see Facebook integration.

Kennish says he created the extension to help quell his desire to delete his Facebook account and that he’s tested it out successfully across a sizable amount of previously Facebook-Connectable sites, including our own (screen shots above) with absolutely no encouragement from Google or Facebook, despite the fact that he works for the former, “Nobody at Google asked or encouraged me to do so, or probably, even knows who I am.”

Okay well now they do.

Thumbnail image: Gizmodo

Company: Google
Website: google.com
Launch Date: September 7, 1998
IPO: NASDAQ:GOOG

Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps and YouTube. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing them with a rich source of information....

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Company: Facebook
Website: facebook.com
Launch Date: February 1, 2004
Funding: $2.34B

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...

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