Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/04/23/disconnect-gives-web-trackers.html
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Weblock provides the same ad and tracker blocking service, and only costs a few bucks for a one-time purchase, no subscription required.
If you actually need a VPN service as well as blocking trackers, do yourself a favour and don’t buy based on an advertisement. Find an impartial reviewer (they still do exist, even in today’s spam-strewn internet).
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Using a VPN to provide the same service an adblocker can accomplish is overkill. Not to mention if you’re using a VPN from anything but a reputable VPN service, you have no idea what they are doing with your data at the other end.
The battery life claim is arguable as well, encrypting and tunneling all traffic through a VPN might negate the processing time saved by blocking trackers. Your best bet is still a Safari content block or whatever the Android equivalent is.
I would pay actual cash money for something that would tell BTOpenzone hotspots they are not welcome on my phone, but sadly, it appears not to exist.
Doesn’t turning “Background App Refresh” off take care of this?
Ask to join wireless networks → off.
Has its downsides, but around here half of the public wifi networks I encounter don’t actually work properly for my phone - the phone joins but forgets to show me the ad-festooned “I agree” login screen, so the phone gets in a state where it has no wifi but thinks it does, rendering wireless data useless.
The battery life hit they are claiming to help with is the hit from downloading and rendering endless ads in the browser or in an app. If the ad server is redirected to 127.0.0.1, which is what Weblock does, then your phone never spends CPU cycles loading that ad.
As best I can tell, it’s a mugwump service that attempts to do all things - provide a VPN, provide spoofing for region locked content, and block ads and trackers. You’re better off getting specific tools for each thing you need done, and skipping those things you don’t need.
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Using Brave on an Android tablet:
Viewing the original post,
script blocking ON:
3 ads/trackers blocked
38 scripts blocked
script blocking OFF:
16 ads/trackers blocked
1 fingerprinting method blocked
This page (comments),
script blocking ON:
1 ad/tracker blocked
35 scripts blocked
script blocking OFF:
6 ads/trackers blocked
Just saying.
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On blog view alone my ublock origin is showing 50 requests blocked and noscript is showing 48 blocked items!
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Yup, I get more or less the same on the desktop.
Usually Firefox, with NoScript, Ghostery, Privacy Badger, Adblocker, TrackMeNot…
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Disconnect blocked 25 various intrusions on the page that contained this article. In fact, it blocked 4 intrusions on this comment page.
Practice what you preach, guys.
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