Home News Tracker Blocking has been added to DuckDuckGo to prevent surveillance on its users

Tracker Blocking has been added to DuckDuckGo to prevent surveillance on its users

by Harikrishna Mekala

The apps and browser expansions are available globally for Android, iOS, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari as of now. DDG tells us Opera is also on its plan but there’s no launch date yet.

“Our perception has been to set the model of trust online,” says CEO and founder Gabe Weinberg, reviewing the new products. “To date, we’ve been really focused on the search engine because it’s really difficult to compete with Google in their core market. But now that we think we can handle that we are gaining progress on this larger vision of defending people across the Internet.

“What we’re really investigating to do is move beyond a search box. What we achieved from talking to people, primarily over the last two years, is that isolation risks have gone completely mainstream.

“People really want a mainstream, simple resolution for privacy.”

DDG’s aim is to establish a ‘use anywhere’ isolation tool that streamlines access to its private search engine with tracker blocking and a package of other “privacy essentials” such as an encryption security piece that automatically transmits a user to an encrypted data of a website if there is one, instead of declaring a default non-encrypted data.

DDG is working up a privacy rating for each website visited. This class is based on how many hidden trackers a site is deploying; whether it’s encrypting your link; and also considering the site’s own privacy policy for the latter activity DDG is partnering with terms of co-operation rating initiative, ToSDR, but also notes that “most privacy policies still remain ignorant” so says it’s going to be helping that group rate and label “as many websites as probable” too.

“The unfortunate reality is that just any sites really deserve an ‘A’ on privacy,” says Weinberg on this. “We can get maximum sites up to a ‘B’ if we can… block all the trackers and get encryption. Then the gulf between the ‘B’ and the ‘A’ is really their privacy policies.

“Unfortunately even if things are checked and encrypted then the site itself can still collect data as a first party and sell it. And so to really get an ‘A’ rating the privacy policy needs to be vetted.”

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