Author of the Facebook Disconnect extension resigned from Google

Programmer Brian Kennish (Brian Kennish) worked at Google for seven years, participating in the creation of the browser Chrome and Google Wave. He gained fame two months ago when, without the permission of the employer, he posted the Facebook Disconnect extension for the Chrome browser, blocking the Facebook Connect module during a visit to third-party resources (today it has already been installed by more than 75 thousand users).

As it turned out, the idea of ​​this expansion contradicts not only the Facebook business, but also the business of Google itself, which also seeks to collect maximum personal information about users while surfing the Web.

While working on the extension, Kennisch realized that his employer was doing the same thing as Facebook, against which the above-mentioned extension was intended. Google collects the search query history for each user, performs contextual advertising targeting for keywords from private e-mail, and also determines the current location of the user to select stores that he currently advertise.
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Brian Kennish says that while working at Google, he never had to deal with users' private data and cookie processing. According to him, he realized the scale of the problem only when he wrote the Facebook Disconnect extension and began to study this topic.

In November 2010, Kennish quit Google to devote more time to developing privacy protection products. Last week, he released a new extension for Chrome, which is simply called Disconnect and blocks not only Facebook spyware, but also the installation of cookies from other companies, including Google.

Interestingly, this is not the only case when Google programmers go against their former company. Another former developer Michael Handlack (Michael Gundlach) is the author of the ad-blocking AdBlock extension, which is available in versions for Chrome and Safari .

As you know, Google allows its employees to spend 20% of their time on their own projects. Kennish says he wrote Facebook Disconnect after business hours.