DuckDuckGo is not only the most popular alternative search engine on the market: as a result of the same impulse that has earned it a niche among the greats, its defense of user privacy, it is also the developer of some of the most powerful anti-tracking tools that you can find currently for PC … and soon, also for Android.
This is what they have called «Android app tracking protection«, Whose more explicit name cannot be. We are talking about a system through which the DuckDuckGo application for Android will facilitate the ability to block hidden trackers in the rest of the applications that you use every day and that even if you don’t know it, they are tracking you. Especially the free ones.
According to Wired, this “Android Application Tracking Protection” is being implemented in beta version [de DuckDuckGo] and has aiming to mimic iOS controls«, Those who have done so much damage to the advertising industry less scrupulous and who have done so much good for the user, despite how late they have arrived.
Like almost all the relative policies of the company now called Meta, the amount of data collected by applications such as acebook is atrocious, and if the protection measures against this abuse made a dent in iOS, and for example, the around 10,000 million dollars in estimated loss of companies such as Facebook, Snap, Twitter and YouTube following privacy changes on the iPhone.
Well, since Google is not expected to do something similar on Android, DuckDuckGo takes the lead. “The idea is that we block this data collection before it happens in third-party applications,” says Peter Dolanjski, DuckDuckGo Product Manager. “You should see a lot less creepy ads following you online.”
DuckDuckGo has reviewed many of the most popular free apps for Android and more than 96 percent of them contain trackers, all related in one way or another to the large internet advertising networks, such as Google and Facebook. Among the data that these applications collect without the user noticing, there is a little of everything necessary to create a personalized profile to sell you better.
But how will DuckDuckGo go about blocking a system-level tracking on iOS? We will have to see it, but from what they explain everything indicates that it will be done through their application, DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser … or what is the same, it will only block the trackers that concern it and not at the system level as it happens in iOS …
Or what is also the same, you will have to use DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser, a Chromium derivative for Android, for the “application tracking protection” to work, which is not necessary if you already use other browsers that protect you from tracking, such as Brave, Firefox or Vivaldi. The latter, in fact, uses exactly the same system as DuckDuckGo.
For more information, we talk about Tracker Radar, one of the most powerful tracker protection systems on the market, released and maintained as an open source project by DuckDuckGo since its launch.
However, it will be necessary to see how the invention works once it is available, because at the moment it is in beta testing phase: if you are interested in being taken into account, enter the browser settings and sign up for the option «App Tracking protection ». We have already done it and as they give way to us, we will tell you in detail, since it is possible that there are news of interest.
