Search engine duckduckgo Made for those concerned with privacy – and it just got a little more private.
On Wednesday, DuckDuckGo announced that App Tracking Protection, a beta feature that helps you block third-party trackers in your apps, even when you’re not using them, is now available to 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 with 1,000 to 2,000 tracking attempts per day. To use the new feature, all users need to do is update to the latest version of the Android app, open Settings, select “App Tracking Protection,” and follow the instructions.
If the feature sounds familiar, it’s because iOS users already have access to a private browsing experience similar to Apple’s app tracking Transparency. but as DuckDuckGo explains in their blog postIts implementation, which is quite different from Apple’s in that it is opt-out by default, services Android – a user base that makes up the majority of smartphone users worldwide. Whether this will actually protect the browsing habits of Android users remains to be seen. Apple’s own app tracking feature has recently come under scrutiny due to a lawsuit alleging that the tech giant continued to track users’ activity even when tracking was disabled.
Overall, this sounds like great news for privacy-seeking smartphone users, but could be another death knell for data leeches like Meta.
