Sales of George Orwell’s 1984 spiked 7,000 percent during the 24-hour period after Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA’s surveillance programs. It’s no doubt that people care about their privacy. But how do you protect yourself when you’re not even sure who is looking at what, if anything, you may be posting on the web?
When it comes to online privacy, B Corporation Disconnect is all about helping people understand and take control of their online data. As if there’s no better timing, the company announced yesterday that it completed a $3.5 million Series A round led by FirstMark Capital. The company’s total funding now sits at $4.1 million.
Co-founders Brian Kennish, a former Google engineer, and Casey Oppenheim, a consumer- and privacy-rights advocate and attorney, say the new funding will be used to make their easy-to-use apps available to as many people on as many platforms as possible.
They just launched the company’s latest app, Disconnect 2, for Safari and Opera. The app is a browser extension that lets users visualize and block more than 2,000 third-party websites that may track people’s browsing history. It also filters out possible sources of malware, encrypts the data users share with popular sites to prevent wireless eavesdropping, and optimizes pages to make them load faster.
With the release, Disconnect 2 is now available for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera browsers.
“Increasingly, people want to know who’s tracking them online and want to have a say about what information is being collected about them,” says Oppenheim. “Our software is designed to put users back in control so they can decide how their personal data is used,” adds Kennish.
As a B Corporation, Disconnect joins a number of for-profit businesses solving important social issues. Gus Warren, a former Venture Partner at FirstMark Capital who has now joined Disconnect’s executive team and will run the company’s New York office, says that being a B Corporation allows the company to “spend more time than a traditional company on activities such as consumer education, petition drives, and close collaboration with non-profits”.
“We’re really excited about Disconnect,” adds Rick Heitzmann, a founder and Managing Director of FirstMark Capital. ”As recent events have emphasized, we believe online privacy is a ‘megatrend’ that will be an increasingly important issue for more and more people for many years to come and we believe Disconnect will continue to lead in the space.”