You've been told again and again that you shouldn't reveal any personal information on the web.
Yeah, right.
So, when you order the latest smartphone or barbecue grill, how does the merchant know where to send it without your address? How do you pay, without revealing your credit card number? The answer is, you don't.
Not without help from Abine Blur Premium, a privacy service designed to let you do all those things and more without giving away a jot of private data.
Over the years, Blur has perfected the process of communicating and shopping online without giving away personal information.
Blur's free edition blocks web trackers, masks your email address, and manages passwords.
Once you try it, though, you'll almost certainly want the $39 per year Premium edition, which adds masked credit cards, masked phone numbers, and more.
There's a $2 charge for each masked credit card, to cover Abine's transaction-handling costs.
New since my last review, the $99 Abine Blur Unlimited removes that fee.
If you make more than 30 masked transactions per year, it's a good deal.
You can also pay $14.99 per month for the same unlimited service, but that adds up to nearly twice the cost over time.
As a Blur user, you qualify for a discount on Abine DeleteMe(129.00 20% Discount on any DeleteMe subscription with code PCMAG at DeleteMe).
This service uses automatic processes and human agents to remove your personal data from online aggregator.
My Abine contact points out that Blur users have less data exposed, so they merit a discount.
Blur installs in your browser (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari) and puts a single, simple button on the toolbar.
It still doesn't support Microsoft Edge, but my company contacts tell me that Edge support is coming, due to Edge becoming Chromium-based.
Clicking the toolbar button brings up a small panel that in turn offers access to four major function areas: Accounts, Wallet, Masking, and Tracking.
Your private data is all stored locally and synced between devices over an encrypted connection.
For full access to the program's dashboard, simply click the word Blur at the bottom left of the popup panel.
The dashboard lets you configure the same four function areas.
From the dashboard you can also send a link to install Blur on your iOS or Android devices.
For more direct access to features and less drilling down, you can expand the dashboard to nine icons: Accounts, Masked Emails, Tracking, Masked Cards, Passwords, Masked Phones, Auto-fill Credit Cards, Auto-fill Addresses, and Auto-fill Identities.
Each time you log in to a new device, Blur sends a notification email with details.
If you aren't the one who logged in, that's a serious red flag.
Fortunately, the notification includes a link that lets you see all devices connected to your account and remotely disconnect the problem session.
Do Not Track Me
Logically, your web surfing habits are nobody's business but your own.
However, advertisers, social media sites, and web analytics groups all profit by tracking your activities online.
Your browser can send a Do Not Track header, but it's toothless.
Websites can and do ignore it.
Abine pioneered the idea of a Do Not Track system that actively prevents this kind of tracking.
Several general-purpose security products include a similar active Do Not Track function, among them AVG AntiVirus Free and Kaspersky Internet Security.
The company states that with the latest version Blur blocks more trackers than ever.
For each website you visit, the Blur toolbar button in the browser displays how many trackers it detected and blocked.
Clicking the button brings up the access panel for Blur services; clicking Tracking in that panel displays full details.
You can see exactly which ad aggregators, social media sites, and web analytics systems didn't get to track you, thanks to Blur.
This panel also lets you turn off blocking for any specific tracker, or for an entire website.
Clicking a link opens a chart of your tracker-blocking statistics over time.
Manage Your Passwords
Blur includes a straightforward password manager.
As expected, it captures credentials when you log in and automatically fills saved credentials when you revisit the site.
If you've saved more than one set of credentials, it offers a menu of available logins.
Naturally you must protect your passwords and other private data with a strong, memorable master password.
As long as you remember that one, Blur takes care of the rest.
By the same token, if you forget your master password, you lose all your saved passwords.
To avoid that awkward situation, Blur generates what it calls a "Backup Passphrase." Mine consisted of 12 words, more than 80 characters.
You can use this passphrase to regain access to your passwords in emergency.
Abine suggests you store it securely.
From the online dashboard, you can view a list of all your passwords and optionally edit or delete entries.
Like LastPass, Dashlane, and many others, Blur lets you assign a friendly label to each saved password.
However, you can't organize them into groups or categories.
Are you switching to Blur from another password manager? Blur can import passwords from LastPass, Dashlane, RoboForm, AgileBits 1Password, and several others.
That's good, but Bitwarden and LastPass import from more than 30 competitors, and KeePass from nearly 40.
You can enhance protection of your stored passwords by enabling two-factor authentication.
Blur supports authentication using Google Authenticator or a work-alike such as Twilio Authy or Duo Mobile.
You can also set it to lock automatically after a period of inactivity, or when the browser restarts.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMOtB7XkTT4[/embed]
Blur offer to generate a strong password when you're signing up for a new service or changing an existing password.
Initially, it offers to make a strong password, or a strong password with customization.
It defaults to 10-character passwords using uppercase letters, lowercase letters, digits, and special characters.
Just 10 characters is unusually short, given that you don't have to remember the generated password, and given that many users just accept the default.
LastPass and 1Password default to 20 characters, and the free Enpass and Myki Password Manager & Authenticator both generate passwords of more than 30 characters.
If you choose to customize, you can raise the password length as high as 25 characters and disable digits or special characters for sites that don't accept them.
However, your generated passwords always include capital and small letters, and any customization you do doesn't stick around for the next time you need a random password.
Keeper Password Manager & Digital Vault, Dashlane, LastPass, and many others give you full control over character sets used.
In trying to see how the password generator works, I clicked the New Strong Password button several times.
I was surprised to find that each click created a new account with a name like "Account.#13" and a non-functional URL.
My Abine contact explained that this prevents you from losing the generated password if you forget to complete the process of creating a new account.
Maybe so, but I wish I'd known that before I clicked the button 20 times.
Blur syncs your stored data across multiple PC, Mac, or mobile devices.
It encrypts your data locally, so nothing is exposed to Abine.
You can also opt for local-only storage, but even Blur's own FAQ advises against it, as you could lose your saved passwords.
If you must use local-only storage, be sure to export your data frequently.
The list of passwords reports the total number of accounts, the number with reused passwords, and the number using masked emails.
You can see a password strength rating by opening any item.
LastPass, Keeper, LogMeOnce Password Management Suite Ultimate and a few others have an actionable password strength report that lists all your passwords from weakest to strongest.
Some go even farther, automating the process of updating passwords on popular websites.
Blur doesn't include advanced features like secure sharing of passwords or digital password inheritance after your death.
It does automatically fill web forms, but that ability technically belongs to the Wallet feature, discussed below.
Hide Your Email Address
Every time you give your email address to a website, you risk the possibility that the site owner will sell it to spammers, or that hackers will steal your data from the site.
Blur solves that problem with masked email addresses.
Instead of giving the site your actual address, you generate a masked address using Blur, along with a descriptive reminder for where you used this specific address.
Messages sent to the masked address arrive in your inbox, and your replies seem to come from the masked address.
The merchant or other website never sees your true address.
New since my last review, you can choose from various domains for your masked email address, and can also choose a memorable account name.
For example, when I chose to create a masked address for use at Amazon, Blur suggested [email protected] You can still choose to have Blur create a random masked email, like [email protected], but my contacts at Abine tell me the ability to create your own account names was a big request from users.
Abine's press materials mentioned a variety of new domains, but when I tried out the feature, I saw just four, none of which the press release mentioned.
I learned that Abine deliberately avoids giving users the full list, to prevent sleazy merchants from blocking disposable email addresses.
Everybody gets four or five choices.
Smart!
From the dashboard, click Masking and then click Masked Emails to view all your masked email addresses, along with the number of times you've used each.
If you start getting spam via one of these masked addresses, simply turn off mail forwarding or delete the address completely.
To make that process simple, Blur inserts a header in the forwarded email with a link to block the corresponding masked email address.
It's a clever solution to an annoying problem.
A temporary inbox displays messages received via masked email addresses for two months, up from just a day of storage when I last reviewed Blur.
Typically, you'll review messages in your regular email client, but this view does give you a quick way to notice and disable a masked email that's become a spam-sink.
Protect Your Credit Card Details
Tracker blocking, password management, and masked email addresses are all available to users of Blur's free edition.
For access to masked credit cards and other advanced features, you must upgrade to the premium edition.
New users get to try premium features free for 30 days.
Masked credit cards work much the same way as masked email addresses.
You register an actual credit or debit card with Abine.
When you click in the credit card field to pay online, Blur pops up and offers to create a masked card.
The online merchant never sees your real credit card number.
At the time you create the masked card, you fill in the precise amount that you're about to pay online.
In truth, a masked credit card is more like a prepaid gift card that happens to hold precisely the amount needed for your current transaction.
An unscrupulous merchant can't pad the bill, because the card's value is capped at the amount of the transaction.
In fact, you can use Blur to create a literal gift card.
Load it with as much moolah as you wish, give Blur the recipient's email, and you're done.
A parental control option lets you retain the ability to see transactions made using the gift card, and close it for a refund if necessary.
When you confirm creation of the masked card, Abine bills your actual credit card for the amount you chose.
Blur automatically fills in your own address for shipping, naturally, and Abine's address for billing.
The transaction appears on your credit card bill as a charge from Abine.
If you wind up not using the masked card, you can cancel it and request a refund with one click.
I tried the service, right up to the point of spending money.
It worked very smoothly, and I had no trouble getting the correct amount refunded.
Note that you can't create a masked card worth less than 10 dollars, but if you truly need to charge a smaller amount, you can spend it and then refund the remainder.
Unlike a masked email address, handling a masked credit card transaction involves some costs for Abine.
As a result, you pay $2 each time you use a masked credit card.
If you're pinching pennies, you could put more than the minimum on a card and use it multiple times.
However, if you plan to use masked cards regularly, you may be better off choosing the $99 Unlimited plan, which has no per-use fees.
Keep Your Phone Number Private
You can install Blur on your Android or iOS phone or tablet and sync your data through Abine's servers.
Syncing is seamless, once you've set it up on your desktop.
You get all the same features as the desktop edition.
The mobile edition adds one major new feature—the ability to make calls while masking your phone number.
Unlike masked emails and credit cards, the masked phone number is a singular new phone number that forwards calls, texts, and voicemails to your actual phone number.
When filling web forms, you can click "Mask My Phone" to enter the masked number.
All callers appear in the Blur dashboard.
If you don't want to receive any more calls from a number, just set forwarding to OFF for that number.
The caller will hear a message stating that the number is no longer available.
You can make calls from the masked number, and receive texts, but you can't send texts.
You can't use masked phone numbers everywhere, but Blur supports use in the US, the UK, and 13 other countries.
Your subscription gets you $3 per month for masked phone usage.
Each call and text costs one cent, and each minute of talking costs another penny.
If you run out, you can add more in increments of $1, $2.50, or $5 directly from the app.
The mobile edition offers a few other features not found in Blur's desktop edition.
On modern iPhones and Androids, you can authenticate to Blur using your fingerprint.
And you can set it to force biometric authorization for purchases made through the app.
On an iPhone, if you want tracker blocking and access to all Blur features you use the built-in browser or work in Safari via Blur's extension.
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