DuckDuckGo (DDG) has been touted and advertised as a privacy-focused company that refrains from adding trackers to its products. The company boasted of launching a personal browser with tracker blocking features by default.
However, it has now revealed that the browser offers limited tracking coverage and that there are still some loopholes in facilitating requests for advertising data from Microsoft.
It should be noted that Microsoft is a syndication partner of DuckDuckGo. Because corporations agree on syndicated search content, the DDG browser allows Microsoft crawlers on third-party websites.
According to researcher Zach Edwards, who shared his unexpected findings about the DuckDuckGo browser on Twitter, he found that DuckDuckGo’s cellular browsers did not block ad requests from Microsoft scripts or non-Microsoft Internet services.
When Edward looked at the browser’s knowledge source in Workplace. com, he found that while DDG informed its users about blocking Facebook and Google trackers, it allowed Microsoft trackers to gain knowledge sources similar to the user’s browsing activities on a non-Microsoft site.
FYI, DuckDuckGo is a search engine that claims never to track users’ searches or habits and never creates user profiles to display classified classified ads and uses contextual classified classified ads from its partners, adding classified ads classifieds from Microsoft. Microsoft classified classified classified ads can track users’ IP addresses and other knowledge after they click on an advertising link.
Reacting to Edwards’ tweets, DDG founder/CEO Gabe Weinberg tried to refute the findings by focusing more on what blocked his browser, third-party cookies, including from Microsoft, blocking trackers, and the HTTPS-always encryption service.
In addition, Weinberg noted that the knowledge factor was not similar to DDG’s search engine. However, the DuckDuckGo browser is exempt from blocking transfers of advertising knowledge to Microsoft affiliates, such as LinkedIn or Bing.
The knowledge would possibly be used to track users on cross-sites in order to demonstrate targeted ads. However, Weinberg showed that his browser allows third-party use of Microsoft Tracker because of the agreement.
“To block non-search related trackers (for example, in our browser), we block as many third-party trackers as possible. Unfortunately, our Microsoft search syndication agreement prevents us from doing more for Microsoft properties. However, we have often pushed and hope to do more soon.
“We’ve always been very careful never to promise anonymity when we browse because that, frankly, is not imaginable given that trackers temporarily replace the way they work to evade the coverages and equipment we recently offered. When most other browsers on the market communicate about tracking coverage, they regularly refer to third-party cookie coverage and fingerprint coverage, and our browsers for iOS, Android, and our new Mac beta impose those restrictions on third-party tracking scripts, adding those from Microsoft.
What we’re talking about here is coverage beyond coverage that most browsers don’t even try to do, i. e. block third-party tracking scripts before they load onto third-party websites. Because we do it where we can, users still enjoy especially greater privacy coverage with DuckDuckGo than with Safari, Firefox, and other browsers. (. . . ) Our goal has always been to provide as much privacy as possible in a single download, by default and without confusing settings.
However, either way, the factor seriously undermines the privacy claims made through DuckDuckGo for so long.
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