Our New iOS App Uncovers and Protects You From Major Apple Privacy Issue
We built this product to give you transparency and control, but what we discovered is making headlines
We are so excited to announce the launch of our new iOS Disconnect Pro app. While making this app we discovered a serious privacy threat that effects all Apple iPhone and iPad users. Wired just wrote about this issue citing our research and we also wrote a longer blog post detailing the threat.
The TLDR version is that Apple is choosing to not encrypt app installs and content downloads, which allows anyone with network access like your ISP (Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, etc), governments, or Wi-Fi snoopers to keep track of this private information and associate it with your unique device and iTunes account identifiers! The puzzling thing is that Apple could fix this issue very easily, and clearly recognizes importance of encryption, but chooses to instead subject all it's users to this privacy threat.
Our new Pro iOS app protects you from the Apple privacy issue and offers amazing free privacy and performance benefits
We've been working on the technology powering our new Pro app since 2013. We call it a SmartVPN, which is not super creative but totally accurate! This new VPN technology keeps your sensitive information private without slowing you down or interfering with your online activity. We've included more detailed info below, but benefits include:
- Encrypt all your web (HTTP) traffic
- Encrypt all your DNS lookups
- Block any tracker you want
- Way faster and cheaper than traditional VPNs
- No logging, no data collection, and we don't serve ads
Free version is awesome!
Even though we only make money when you pay for our products, we just love giving away protection for free and the free version of this app is loaded with previously paid and brand new features. If you care about your privacy there is absolutely no good reason not to install this product immediately!
Device Wide Tracking Protection
Our tracker protection lists now power privacy for tens of millions of users in browsers including Firefox, Samsung, Brave, and Focus. Now the free version of Pro blocks trackers device wide, not just in one browser but across all your apps! These trackers violate your privacy, slow page loads, and waste bandwidth and battery life.
DNS Encryption
Our SmartVPN also encrypts all of your Domain Name System (DNS) lookups. DNS is the phonebook of the Internet, turning websites you visit into Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. DNS servers are great because they eliminate the need for you to memorize the IP addresses of websites you visit, but unencrytped DNS lookups also are vulnerable to being tracked (along with your browsing history) by companies, criminals, and governments. Our SmartVPN fixes that by using encrypted DNS lookups provided by Cloudflare!
Block what you want
Our default protection strikes a balance between privacy and usability, but we are all about putting you in control! Disconnect Pro for iOS now allows you to block or unblock whatever you want! Never use any Facebook services? Try adding Facebook.com to the blocklist and see how they like it! Never want to see another Tweet embed, block Twitter.com. We make it easy to experiment and you can always reset to our default protection, which seeks a balance between privacy and usability.
This is what privacy looks like!
As mentioned above, our new Pro app also shows you all the connections being made to your device behind the scenes. Even our team of experienced privacy geeks were shocked to see the volume of trackers and unsecured traffic. Everyday the average user will see more than a thousand vulnerable HTTP and DNS connections, including those from Apple, and hundreds more tracking requests. We visualize all this information in easy to understand graphs and by showing you a real-time feed of all the connections being made.
Paid version, FREE trial
We need to make money, so we are charging a modest subscription — 50-75% less than popular VPNs — for the new Secure HTTP feature. Here's why you need this.
Your device loads thousands of unsecured HTTP connections everyday. HTTP connections are unencrypted and allow any information being sent — think passwords or credit card numbers — to be looked at and altered by third-parties, like privacy violating corporations, criminals, or governments. Many popular browsers recognize the threat posed by unencrypted HTTP connections and have taken steps to pressure websites to use encrypted HTTP (HTTPS), or to warn users when they visit a website that uses unencrypted HTTP. But what about the thousands of unencrypted HTTP connections made to your device everyday? We were shocked when we realized how much insecure traffic was firing on our iOS devices behind our backs and our paid Secure HTTP feature encrypts it all!
SmartVPN vs VPN
So what makes our VPN "smart"? Well, first of all, it's not that regular VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) are dumb, actually they are a very effective way to encrypt all your traffic, and to change your IP address, which makes it harder to track your online activity. But VPNs can really slow you down — it's physics, routing all your requests through an additional VPN server is an extra hop, which takes more time. VPNs also have a tendency to break things and even interfere with your internet connectivity. Finally, you really have to trust your VPN provider and their server hosting provider, because they are carrying all your traffic.
Our SmartVPN technology creates an encrypted tunnel between your device and our servers, just like a regular VPN. But instead of routing all your traffic our SmartVPN makes real time decisions and only routes traffic that is especially vulnerable to privacy and security threats to maximize your device protection and performance. If you're looking for a traditional VPN that encrypts and changes your IP address for all traffic, then checkout our Premium product which includes a traditional VPN, but if you're looking for an amazing FREE SmartVPN experience our new Pro iOS app is the one for you!
Try out the new Disconnect Pro app for iOS and let us know what you think! Remember we never store or log any traffic routed through our servers and don’t track your IP address or any other personal info, except the info you volunteer like if you choose to email us.