The search engine DuckDuckGo is made for those concerned with privacy — and it just got a bit more private.
On Wednesday, DuckDuckGo announced that App Tracking Protection, a beta feature that helps block third-party trackers in your apps even if you’re not using them, is now available for all Android users. The feature, which launched in beta for a limited number of users about a year ago, has now added the ability to see what personal data trackers are trying to collect.
According to DuckDuckGo, the average Android user has 35 apps on their phone with 1,000 to 2,000 tracking attempts made every day. To use the new feature, all users have to do is update the latest version of the Android app, open settings, select “App Tracking Protection,” and follow the instructions.
If the feature sounds familiar, that’s because iOS users have already had access to a similar private browsing experience with Apple’s App Tracking Transparency. But as DuckDuckGo points out in its blog post, its implementation, which differs significantly from Apple’s in that it’s opt-out by default, services Android — a user base which makes up the majority of smartphone users worldwide. Whether it will truly safeguard Android users’ browsing habits remains to be seen. Apple’s own app tracking feature has recently come under scrutiny thanks to a lawsuit which alleges the tech giant continued to track users’ activity even when tracking was disabled.
In all, this seems to be great news for privacy-seeking smartphone users, but could be a further death knell for data leeches like Meta.
