Spending any amount of time online usually means sharing a certain amount of information about yourself. This could be through the use of cookies, advertisement, social networking integration and many more factors. It may well be that you would prefer not to share details about your online activities and interest and this is where Disconnect 2 can help

This is an add-on for Chrome can be used to take back control of which websites have access to your information. While you may visit any of millions of websites, there are a number of well-known third party sites that are used to track visitors and deliver advertisements. Disconnect works by preventing these known sites from tracking you so that your online experience is a more private one.

But the function of the add-on goes beyond this. Disconnect can also block website analytics and social widgets that not only infringe on your privacy, but also waste bandwidth and slow down your browsing experience.

Blocking can be tweaked to suit your preferences, and you can adjust settings on a page by page basis. Should you find that Disconnect’s activities prevent a particular site you use from working correctly, you can opt to disable it whenever you visit that site. If you’re using a wifi connection, you can bolster security by ensuring that data is encrypted whenever possible.

Disconnect provides you with an interesting selection of information. For any website you visit you can view details of the page requests that are being generated – so you can easily see which websites connect to others. A simple graph overview lets you see just how many requests have been blocked, how much bandwidth has been saved and how much time has been saved by blocking unwanted content.