Free Safari Extension Helps Ensure Privacy

Orbicule has introduced Incognito 1.0, their free Safari extension that helps ensure greater privacy by preventing Google and Facebook from tracking the user's movements and actions while online. Incognito protects the user by blocking Google AdSense and Google Analytics on non-Google pages. In addition, it allows the user to optionally block Facebook content on third-party websites as well as embedded YouTube movies outside of the YouTube website. Although effectively blocking Google Adwords, Incognito is not a dedicated ad-blocker. It simply prevents the aforementioned companies from gathering information about the user from websites other than the company's own.

There are currently an estimated 2,000,000,000 Internet users worldwide of whom 240,000,000 are in the US. While many have heard of familiar Internet perils such as viruses and spam, fewer are aware of the extent to which their personal Internet movements and actions are tracked. In most cases this occurs without the user's knowledge or consent. It is simply an economic reality of the Internet: online advertising is second only to retail sales in generating the income that makes most websites viable. Building and maintaining free web sites like Google Web Search or Facebook is very expensive; ads are the solution. And tracking is what makes online ads so attractive to advertisers.

Google AdSense allows owners of websites to display text, image, and video advertisements on their sites, for which they are paid on either a per-click or per-impression basis. Google earns approximately $8,000,000,000 per year through this program, roughly 30% of their total annual revenues (their search based AdWords accounting for most of the remainder). AdSense ads are generally related to website content. Google Analytics is a free service which provides advertisers with statistics regarding visitors to any particular website. Whether a web surfer has landed on a page as the result of a search engine referral, email marketing link, display ad, etc., those websites which use GA (about 50% of the top 1,000,000) relay that information and the user's unique IP address back to Google.


Feature Highlights:
* Incognito 1.0 is a free extension for Apple's Safari web browser
* Incognito blocks Google Analytics on all web pages except Google's own
* Incognito blocks Google AdSense on all web pages except Google's own
* Incognito optionally blocks Facebook content on all web pages except Facebook's own
* Incognito optionally blocks embedded YouTube movies on all web pages except YouTube's own
* Incognito is an easily downloadable, self-installing extension

Incognito blocks Google, the largest advertising network in the world. For Safari users concerned about Internet privacy, that makes Incognito a very powerful and valuable source of protection. The Incognito extension is compatible with Safari 5 and later, and is a simple, self-installing download.

"Google and others offer a vast lineup of services that help make the Internet useful, but all that assistance comes with a cost: your privacy", said Peter Schols, president of Orbicule. "Incognito lets you block these companies from gathering data outside the context of their own website(s)."

Pricing and Availability:
Incognito 1.0 is a free extension for the Apple Safari web browser, and may be downloaded from the Orbicule website.


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