The Online Privacy Company

I signed up for their "unlimited" service and quickly found that it's quite limited - of course they don't tell you this up front. Supposedly this masked card service is to mask your privacy, but Abine tracks EVERYTHING you do and then uses your data for their own purposes. I found out that 1) you can't use the service more than 3 times a day and 2) you can't make more than 3 purchases with your (real) credit card before they start adding a $2 surcharge unless you switch to funding with your bank account. Of course once they have your bank account info, then they can just take money at will. So I used the service 3 times a day (which was the max) and then after 3 days, my account was locked and I was not able to use it. Of course their chat was unavailable even during business hours, so I sent an email which took them 72 hours to respond to. They said because I was ordering from the same website, a red flag had been raised and they needed DETAILED information about what I was ordering. What? You've never ordered multiple times from the same website? Isn't this the age of online shopping? I've put in 10 orders to Amazon in a day before. Why are they tracking everything I do? And why do they assume everyone using their service is a criminal? I explained to the customer service why it was all the same website (only 3 times a day max and I've had privacy issues with the website before), but they still refused to help me. My only recourse is now to cancel, make sure I get a full refund for their crap service, and hope they don't steal from my bank account! AVOID THIS COMPANY, USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

I have been using chrome blocker since August, 2010. I use it to block all, including the 4 trackers on the Jabber website. I assume it is working. But, I will telll you that I have never been directed to purchase anything from Abine; it just keeps working quietly in the background.

Now that I know they have something that will do the same for IE, which I have to use at work since other programs I need only tie into it, I will let you know.

I'd hate for this to sound like overkill, but Abine really has changed the way I use the internet for the better. I haven't had a chance to explore all of the features yet, so I can't speak on the product as a whole, but I like what I've seen so far. The opt out functions and protection against tracking are more effective and easier to use than the add-ons I was using before I found Abine.

I also like being able to see all of the accounts I've signed up for (and allowed password save permission) but forgot existed. One such site had my credit card info stored on it as well. I was able to find this easily and delete the stored access info with the Abine privacy suite.

Finally, the email alias function and identity manager allows me to send inquiries and sign up for offers and accounts without having to worry about an onslaught of followups, surveys, and spam to my main email account.

I have to give a 4 out of 4. It's just too cool and too easy to use. I would definitely recommend it to all of my fellow privacy-conscious web surfers out there.

Abine is providing a tool do not track me. I installed the tool and it looks working fine. But my concern is they are tracking us by showing number of trackers stopped by Abine tool using some sort of their own tracker that is not blocked by them. They say the data they have is safe but that's what all companies say. How about when they are getting acquired by a bigger company? Data will be sold to them. Irony - Do not Track itself tracks me.

I like the look of Abine. It displays the relevant information about tracking, optout, and cookies at the lower right of the browser. However, unfortunately, it also slows down my browsing experience. I've tried a few things to deal with this, but it slows down my service, even the Fast Dial page I set up for Firefox. At the present time I cannot recommend this, but I do recommend they take some cues from the Ad Block and NoScript! Add-ons for Firefox.

I have barely started using 2 of the Abine products, free versions. Do Not Track Me & MaskMe. I get an email request from Abine to take a survey for Abine:
http://deletemecj.surveyanalytics.com/

Help us develop our next privacy tool

Here at Abine we're hard at work developing the next big tools in online
Privacy, and could use your help to make them better. We rely on user
Feedback to make sure we're developing products our users will love.

If you have 1-2 minutes, please help us out by taking a quick survey.
Thanks!

So, I agreed & got into the survey. First question was which of their products I use, Second question was wanting to know if I pay for an identity theft protection. Third question is about all my insurance coverage. Health, auto, etc. & I just closed the survey window. I don't think this was cool, at all. Why do they need to know what kind of insurance I purchase & use? I agreed to take the survey to help them better their product & they want to know my insurance usage, almost at the very beginning of the survey.

It appears that they were not trying to better their product, but sell me another product. I went back and went through the survey & it just seems like a convoluted hot mess.

I have no use for companies that aren't more honest & to the point. Just try to sell me something else. Do not mask your sales attempts! Especially when you are trying to sell me privacy software.

Also, I noticed that the MaskMe program had recorded my log in info on a couple of my accounts that I have had for years, that I had not used the MaskMe service to create. I got no permissions requester, at all, to do this. Found it odd that it only did this on a couple accounts, rather than all that I had logged into, since I started using MaskMe.

MaskMe is still in beta & only offered after I installed Do Not Track Me.

Here's something that's going to find a home in many people's browsers, I reckon. If you are already running the Taco 3 anti-cookie add-on for Firefox you've already got this installed from the time of writing this review. If not, give it a try, I think it's a useful one.

What the add-on does is to present you with a comprehensive report of what a website is up to, behind the scenes, as soon as you arrive. For example it will tell you, if it knows, what information this site is storing about you; it will tell you what, if any, tracking services the site is using to follow you around, and it will tell you how many cookies the site has dumped on your computer already. It will also give you a rough idea of how safe the site is, if you don't want to get bogged down in the various details. The data is provided in an unusually pretty format, which will catch your eye even if the information provided doesn't.

Sitejabber just squeaks into the 'safe' portion of the chart, because it uses Google Analytics, but otherwise it seems a safe enough place to visit - so far;-)

Another service that Abine is trying out, is called 'Delete Me' and the concept here is that for a price, depending on difficulty, they will remove details about you which you or others have unfortunately posted to various places and now wish you hadn't. The most commonly requested, unsurprisingly, is removal of a Facebook or MySpace account, but the company promises to tackle much more complicated and/or secure data for an appropriate fee. As long as they keep these fees reasonable, I can see this being a popular service once the word gets around.

The Abine services are currently in beta, which means that they should be reasonably stable for most users but may throw a bug now and again, or simply that the provided data and the overall presentation hasn't been formalized yet. The browser add-on seems rock solid to me, so I see no reason NOT to give it a try. What websites are doing with whatever data they can grab is important and you should be informed, even if you don't necessarily choose to do anything drastic with that information.

I'd like to see this combined with user-created information such as that provided by the Web Of Trust service; it's not essential, since if you want that data then you will probably have joined WOT anyway. But it would be neat to have the WOT rating there, as an encouragement to join up as well as providing another layer of security. Other than that, I find little or nothing to fault about this one and it should do well.