giantbomb, disconnectme, 3rd party tracking

At the risk of sounding like a paranoid noob (my dad is always asking if people are hacking into his computer when his printer stops working), wondering why is it when giantbomb site is surfed with disconnect.me browser extension, it shows as blocking 9 requests for sharing info with 3rd parties. For me 2 Facebook, 6 google, 1 twitter.

What's disconnectme? I hadn't heard of it until this week.

"... is a browser extension that stops major third parties and search engines from tracking the webpages you go to and searches you do. "

I don't understand how it works exactly, but would it be possible / make-sense for this tracking to be (optionally?) turned off for paying members?

Cheers!

@revengecat said:

At the risk of sounding like a paranoid noob (my dad is always asking if people are hacking into his computer when his printer stops working), wondering why is it when giantbomb site is surfed with disconnect.me browser extension, it shows as blocking 9 requests for sharing info with 3rd parties. For me 2 Facebook, 6 google, 1 twitter.

What's disconnectme? I hadn't heard of it until this week.

"... is a browser extension that stops major third parties and search engines from tracking the webpages you go to and searches you do. "

I don't understand how it works exactly, but would it be possible / make-sense for this tracking to be (optionally?) turned off for paying members?

Cheers!

Because every fucking site on the internet these days feels compelled to add that stupid "Google +1" and "Facebook Like" and "Facebook Discussion Threads" and "Tweet this thing on twitter" buttons to every fucking page. Your best bet is to use adblock (and disable the "allow some advertisers to get through adblock" option the guy added to it), use disconnect.me (filtering it at your router or DNS level would be best, but disconnect.me would give you the option of easily turning it back on when/if you want), and then use something like OpenDNS so you can then go in and add additional culprits that you want to make sure are blocked house-wide for *anyone* that ever uses your network (for example, you'd probably want to put doubleclick on your DNS black list).

As for disabling it on GB, sure, if you're a paying member (or maybe for everyone) there's an option to turn those off somewhere int he settings on GB accounts. But then you still have it on every single other web page on the internet, all filtering right back into Google and Facebook's data mining. Disconnect.Me will block it across the board (and allow you to toggle it on/off as desired).

You could also use noscript.

@Branthog: Cheers for the reply. There is an option in settings to "Show Facebook and Twitter Links on the site?", which i turned off but disconnect still shows just as much traffic trying to pass on to 3rd parties.

Would be cool if GB did allow paying users to turn that stuff off. I undersatnd that I can work around it (not as easily on my phone though), but I don't want to have to. Guess the fact is that most people don't mind giving Facebook, twitter, google all that info.

@revengecat said:

@Branthog: Cheers for the reply. There is an option in settings to "Show Facebook and Twitter Links on the site?", which i turned off but disconnect still shows just as much traffic trying to pass on to 3rd parties.

Would be cool if GB did allow paying users to turn that stuff off. I undersatnd that I can work around it (not as easily on my phone though), but I don't want to have to. Guess the fact is that most people don't mind giving Facebook, twitter, google all that info.

Fairly certain you can turn it off. Go check your settings.

@StarFoxA: Hey thanks for reply. Possible I'm missing it, but closest I see is the attached, and it definitely does not stop info from flowing to those sites (according to disconnectme anyhow)

Ugh. The Meebo Bar is one of the sources of everything wrong with the internet at large.

Btw, had a look through settings in the new beta site, and don't see any options to turn this stuff off there either.

Vinny wanted to put the big bo bar on the site, but got overridden.