Privacy firms boom in wake of surveillance scandal

[...] surveys have found the unremitting surveillance scandal could take billion-dollar bites out of businesses whose stock-in-trade is user information - which is to say, much of the online economy today. [...] there's been a surge of funding, new customers and media attention for these sorts of companies and their projects. The storage company, founded in 2007 and operating in a converted industrial space in the Mission District, designed a clever way to avoid having to hand over customer information through government subpoenas, network taps or otherwise. The Palo Alto organization creates a browser extension that blocks third-party services on websites, preventing about 2,500 analytics firms, advertising networks and others from surreptitiously dropping tracking cookies and collecting data about users. Last month, Disconnect added a "secure search" extension, which sets up the equivalent of a virtual private network, allowing people to use their favorite search engine anonymously. Founded in 2011, the so-called benefit corporation - an organizational structure that allows businesses to prioritize social as well as financial goals - now employs 12 full-time workers and has about 1.5 million weekly active users. [...] last month, the founders of Silent Circle and Lavabit announced they were teaming up to launch the "DarkMail Alliance," a nonprofit project to develop open source code for a new type of e-mail based on a more secure underlying protocol. The news generated a wave of media attention, in part because both services had famously shut down their e-mail services in the wake of the NSA stories as doubts grew about their ability to ensure the privacy of users. [...] respected security researcher Moxie Marlinspike recently critiqued the technical shortcomings of Lavabit's earlier mail service in a piece for Ars Technica, and told me it was close to "snake oil security services."