The two secure browsers, Brave and DuckDuckGo, have announced launching features to block Google AMP Tracking technology. Both browsers announced this move around the same time in a bid to enhance users’ privacy against Google tracking.
Brave, DuckDuckGo Block Google Tracking
Both Brave and DuckDuckGo stepped into the market as Google’s privacy-friendly rivals. Hence, both services keep introducing measures to strengthen users’ privacy, especially, against Google’s intrusive practices.
Continuing this effort, both Brave and DuckDuckGo have separately announced thwarting Google AMP tracking with their new measures.
Explaining quickly for the users, AMP Tracking links back to Google’s dedicated “Accelerated Mobile Pages” (AMP) – an open-source HTML framework. The tech giant launched this feature in 2015 in a bid to accelerate searching activities for mobile users.
Google claimed that AMP HTML would allow pages to load quickly on mobile devices. It even urged web developers to design AMP pages for a better user experience on mobile devices. However, it soon raised concerns for privacy-savvy users as the feature seemingly facilitated user tracking.
So now, to combat this problem, Brave has announced launching “De-AMP” to its browser. With this feature, Brave has intended to block interactions between the users and AMP pages to the maximum extent. As stated in its post,
Where possible, De-AMP will rewrite links and URLs to prevent users from visiting AMP pages altogether. And in cases where that is not possible, Brave will watch as pages are being fetched and redirect users away from AMP pages before the page is even rendered, preventing AMP/Google code from being loaded and executed.
Around the same time, the other privacy-friendly service, DuckDuckGo, also announced a similar measure via its official Twitter account. As stated, DuckDuckGo apps and extensions will now block Google AMP pages and instead show the original web pages to the users.
AMP technology is bad for privacy because it enables Google to track users even more (which is already a ton).
And, Google uses AMP to further entrench its monopoly, forcing the technology on publishers by prioritizing AMP links in search and favoring Google ads on AMP pages.
— DuckDuckGo (@DuckDuckGo) April 19, 2022
For now, DuckDuckGo hasn’t explained much about how this feature will work. But it’s clear that this service has also stepped ahead for better user privacy.
