Mapping the Hidden Internet Since 2011

In 1997, I was interning as an investigator for public defenders in Manhattan. When I needed information about a case, I waited in line for hours to pay $15 to pull a single record from a dusty basement archive in the courthouse. For anything more sophisticated, I ordered a skip trace: an actual human investigator tracking down utility and phone bills and addresses through manual research. Finding and verifying information about people was slow, expensive, and physical.

Through the late 1990s and as a practicing lawyer in the 2000s, I watched all the information I used to dig up by hand migrate online. At the same time, a new industry was taking shape: companies tracking people across the internet, accumulating massive datasets about online behavior that had never existed before. Almost all of it was happening without people's knowledge or consent.

Companies started collecting and monetizing all the data they could. For a price, and with a few clicks of a mouse, anyone could see where you live, who you live with, your phone number, your email, and much more. And that was just the old data coming online. The new data (what you browsed, searched for, bought, where you went) was being collected at a scale no one had imagined. And all this data was being stored and shared with privacy and security practices that hadn't caught up to the stakes.

My legal practice gave me another vantage point. I represented tech companies. One client built tax processing systems for state and local governments that handled massive amounts of personal information. Other clients, an early competitor to iTunes and a large, subscriber-based environmental nonprofit, had hundreds of thousands of customer records and credit card numbers. I saw firsthand the security and privacy gaps around sensitive data and understood that the challenges were systemic, not isolated to my clients.

I wanted to give people a way to see and control what was happening to their data, so I started building. In 2011, I co-founded Disconnect with Brian Kennish, an engineer who had been at DoubleClick and then Google. He understood exactly how the tracking infrastructure worked from the inside. I moved my family from Minneapolis to San Francisco and we got to work.

We started by making the invisible visible.

Our first product was a browser extension that showed people, in real time, who was tracking them online. Most people had no idea. We did. And it turned out the browsers did too — they just needed someone willing to do the hard work of mapping the entire tracking ecosystem and keeping it current.

In 2013, Patrick Jackson joined as our CTO. Patrick is a former NSA engineer who decided to use his deep expertise in surveillance systems and network security to empower people with better privacy protections. Together, we built the tracker protection technology that Mozilla integrated into Firefox, that Microsoft built into Edge, that Samsung shipped in Samsung Internet, and that Google partnered with us on for Chrome IP Protection.

Today, our technology visualizes over 50 trillion trackers per year and protects hundreds of millions of users by default. The New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, NBC News, Consumer Reports, and many other global publications rely on our data and expertise when they investigate privacy abuses.

But the threat has evolved. For years, mass data collection driven primarily by advertising was alarming. Now, with advances in AI technology, all that data collection has become extremely dangerous for individuals and organizations.

The tracker data collected yesterday is the AI weapon of today.

Browsing and app activity, location tracing, and extremely detailed behavioral, psychological, and financial profiles now feed AI systems that can identify anyone from a photo, exploit financial and health vulnerabilities, and craft hyper-targeted attacks.

This is why we're expanding. We now offer enterprise-grade tracker protection for organizations, a privacy intelligence API for businesses, and a new generation of products that give individuals and employees protection they love to use.

What drives us

We want every person and every organization to be able to see and control who tracks them. The hidden internet should be visible. With 15 years of tracker intelligence, we're more committed than ever to putting people back in charge of their data and building a great business without compromising its values.

We've been doing this longer than almost anyone. We're just getting started.

— Casey Oppenheim, Founder & CEO