DuckDuckGo! CEO and Founder Gabriel Weinberg has announced increased protection from Microsoft trackers, expanded transparency around its web privacy protections, and more.
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. Here are some highlights from Weinberg’s blog post about the expanded web privacy protections, transparency, and more:
More Privacy: Expanding 3rd-Party Tracker Loading Protection to Include Microsoft
- In addition to the Microsoft tracking we were already restricting, over the next week, we will start blocking third-party Microsoft tracking scripts from loading on websites in our browsing apps (iOS and Android) and in our browser extensions (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge and Opera), with beta apps to follow in the coming month.
- This is part of our 3rd-Party Tracker Loading Protection, which blocks identified tracking scripts from Facebook, Google, and other companies from loading on third-party websites, and will block third-party Microsoft tracking scripts as well. We explain how this works differently with DuckDuckGo advertising below.
- This web tracking protection is not offered by most other popular browsers by default and sits on top of many other DuckDuckGo protections. All together, our browsing apps and extensions currently offer more protection against Microsoft trackers by default than Chrome, Firefox, Safari and more.
- Also, to help clear up some other misconceptions floating around, Microsoft scripts were never embedded in our search engine or apps, which do not track you. Websites insert these scripts for their own purposes, and so they never sent any information to DuckDuckGo.
- It would not be correct to say we previously allowed all or even most Microsoft tracking attempts in our browser. Prior to this update, we were already blocking most MSFT scripts from loading and further restricting Microsoft tracking through our other web tracking protections, like blocking Microsoft’s third-party cookies in our browsers. Often websites use tag managers to load multiple other scripts, the most popular one is Google Tag manager. Since most Microsoft scripts load through tag managers, those requests were already being blocked by 3rd Party Tracker Loading Protection before this update. In fact, we ran a test to see how much more blocking is happening as a result of this new update and based on the top 1,000 websites we found the increase was only 0.25%.
More Transparency: Public Block List & New Web Tracking Protections Help Page:
- A new help page that offers a comprehensive explanation of all the web tracking protections we provide across platforms. Users now have one place to look if they want to understand the different kinds of web privacy protections we offer on the platforms they use. This page also explains how different web tracking protections are available based on what is technically possible on each platform as well as what’s in development for this part of our product roadmap.
- We’ve now made our tracker protection list publicly available, so folks can see for themselves what we’re blocking and report any issues.
- We’re updating the Privacy Dashboard within our apps and extensions to show more information about third-party requests. Using the updated Dashboard, users can see which third-party requests have been blocked from loading and which other third-party requests have loaded, with reasons for both when available.
- Both before and after this update, users were/are getting more web overall tracking protection than they would by default on most other browsers.
Working Towards Private Ad Conversions:
- Advertising on DuckDuckGo is done in partnership with Microsoft. Viewing ads on DuckDuckGo is anonymous, and Microsoft has publicly and contractually committed to not profile our users on ad clicks; more on that here.
- To evaluate whether an ad on DuckDuckGo is effective, advertisers want to know if their ad clicks turn into purchases (conversions). To see this within Microsoft Advertising, they use Microsoft scripts from the bat.bing.com domain. Currently, if an advertiser wants to detect conversions for their own ads that are shown on DuckDuckGo, 3rd-Party Tracker Loading Protection will not block bat.bing.com requests from loading on the advertiser’s website following DuckDuckGo ad clicks. (The requests are blocked in all other contexts as described above.) For anyone who wants to avoid this, it’s possible to disable ads in DuckDuckGo search settings.
- Not all advertisers actually embed the bat.bing.com script on their website (so it doesn’t happen after every ad click, just when the script is present) and we made the point about tag managers above, which is relevant to this.
- To eventually replace the reliance on bat.bing.com for evaluating ad effectiveness, we’ve started working on an architecture for private ad conversions that can be externally validated as non-profiling. DuckDuckGo isn’t alone in trying to solve this issue; Safari is working on Private Click Measurement (PCM) and Firefox is working on Interoperable Private Attribution (IPA).
