Disconnect Facebook author quits Google



    Programmer Brian Kennish has been with Google for seven years, contributing to the creation of the Chrome browser and Google Wave. He gained fame two months ago when, without permission from the employer, he posted the Facebook Disconnect extension for the Chrome browser, which blocks the Facebook Connect module while visiting third-party resources (more than 75,000 users have installed it today).

    As it turned out, the idea of ​​this extension contradicts not only the business of Facebook, but also the business of Google itself, which also seeks to collect the maximum personal information about users during their surfing the Web.

    While working on the extension, Kennish realized that his employer was doing the same thing as Facebook, against which the above extension is intended. Google collects a history of search queries for each user, carries out contextual advertising by keywords from private email, and also determines the current location of the user to select the stores that he is currently advertising.

    Brian Kennish says that while working at Google, he never had to deal with private user data and cookie handling. According to him, he realized the scale of the problem only when he wrote the Facebook Disconnect extension and began to study this topic.

    In November 2010, Kennish quit Google to devote more time to developing privacy products. Last week, he released a new extension for Chrome, which is simply called Disconnect and blocks not only the Facebook spyware module, but also the installation of cookies from other companies, including Google.

    Interestingly, this is not the only case when Google programmers go against their former company. Another former developer, Michael Gundlach, is the author of the ad-blocking adblock extension, which is available in versions for Chrome and Safari .

    As you know, Google allows its employees to spend 20% of their time on their own projects. Kenish claims he wrote Facebook Disconnect after business hours.

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