Earlier this week it was reported that the privacy-focused DuckDuckGo purportedly allows Microsoft trackers on third-party sites due to an agreement in their syndicated search content contract between the two companies. Now the folks behind the web browser have responded with a statement to Apple World Today.
DuckDuckGo is described by it makers as a web browser “that doesn’t track you.” It lets you surf the web without your searches being saved or your info shared with advertisers.
Following is a statement from Gabriel Weinberg, founder & CEO, DuckDuckGo: We have always been extremely careful to never promise anonymity when browsing, because that frankly isn’t possible given how quickly trackers change how they work to evade protections and the tools we currently offer. When most other browsers on the market talk about tracking protection, they are usually referring to 3rd-party cookie protection and fingerprinting protection, and our browsers for iOS, Android, and our new Mac beta, impose these restrictions on third-party tracking scripts, including those from Microsoft.
What we’re talking about here is an above-and-beyond protection that most browsers don’t even attempt to do — that is, blocking third-party tracking scripts before they load on 3rd party websites. Because we’re doing this where we can, users are still getting significantly more privacy protection with DuckDuckGo than they would using Safari, Firefox and other browsers. This blog post we published gets into the real benefits users enjoy from this approach, like faster load times (46% average decrease) and less data transferred (34% average decrease). Our goal has always been to provide the most privacy we can in one download, by default without any complicated settings.
