DuckDuckGo is soon protecting you from most Microsoft scripts – Ghacks
DuckDuckGo CEO and founder Gabriel Weinberg announced today that the company’s apps and browser extensions will block Microsoft tracking scripts soon as well.
DuckDuckGo found itself at the center of a controversy in May when it was discovered that the company’s privacy-focused products were not blocking Microsoft trackers.
Weinberg announced today that DuckDuckGo’s apps and extensions will block Microsoft scripts, just like the products are blocking Google, Facebook and other scripts that could be used for tracking purposes. The company’s products will block scripts from Microsoft from loading on websites via the 3rd-Party Tracker Loading Protection feature.
DuckDuckGo plans to roll out the improvement in the next week across company products. Beta versions of the apps will get the protection in the coming months, according to Weinberg.
DuckDuckGo has a partnership with Microsoft. Microsoft provides the company with access to data from its Bing search engine. Weinberg notes that the Microsoft tracking exemption in DuckDuckGo’s products was “due to a policy requirement”. He notes that this policy is no longer in effect and that this has paved the way for the extension of the tracker blocking in the company’s products.
DuckDuckGo did not embed Microsoft scripts on its website or in the company’s applications or extensions.
Microsoft is DuckDuckGo’s advertising partner as well. DuckDuckGo and Microsoft have an agreement that Microsoft won’t use interactions with ad-clicks to profile users. Data is also not stored or shared, “other than for accounting purposes” according to Weinberg.
DuckDuckGo’s applications won’t block certain Microsoft scripts from running on third-party sites that are used for conversion tracking. The script is loaded on the target site after interaction with an ad to track conversions. Weinberg reveals that DuckDuckGo users may disable ads in the DuckDuckGo search settings to prevent this from happening.
DuckDuckgo plans to create a better solution for conversion tracking that replaces the current method.
To improve transparency, DuckDuckGo made its tracker protection list publicly available. Additionally, its products are showing more information in the privacy dashboard in regards to third-party requests.
Interested users may check out a new support page that provides details on the company’s web tracking protections.
Closing Words
Weinberg does not provide specifics on how his company and Microsoft came to the new agreement and the removing of the user-unfriendly policy. Whether the controversy hurt DuckDuckgo’s growth or reputation remains to be seen. It is clear that some users were not too happy with the revelation. It is difficult to earn trust, but easy to game it.
Now You: do you use DuckDuckGo Search or the company’s other products?
They still manipulate results, so there is no reason to use them, because they’ve become basically identical to Bing. Google, Brave, and Yandex have a good mix of results. There are more search engines being developed, DDG needs to go back to being an unbiased search engine or it will be left behind.
Too late. Trust is like a first kiss. You don’t get a second chance at either a first kiss or broken trust. A lesson DDG needs to learn.
The same Duckduckgo where the CEO admitted on twitter that they censor search results “for your own good” ?
No thank you.
What I need is a way to search with bing without letting it turn …
This “https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11252248/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2”
Into this…
“https://www.bing.com/ck/a?!&&p=a7e413bcd500cbe7JmltdHM9MTY1OTczNzY0OCZpZ3VpZD0zMGVmYTliZC0zZGI2LTQ2NWUtYjVmYy02OWM5OGExMmI5NzgmaW5zaWQ9NTMxMg&ptn=3&hsh=3&fclid=ec80d7b9-150b-11ed-b71b-39f070a9c2cf&u=a1aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuaW1kYi5jb20vdGl0bGUvdHQxMTI1MjI0OC8&ntb=1”
It definately did hurt it’s reputation. It didn’t help either when DDG announced they would start censoring results.
I changed my search engine at that point but the choice out there is terrible. Startpage and swisscows have so many issues they are essentially unusable.
You aren’t wrong about the search engine choice’s being terrible. They all fail for one reason or another. Searx.be is probably one of the better ones but keep in mind that you may need to go into the engines and enable more than just google and make sure your browser cookie settings or addons/extensions will not delete or block it or you will just keep on getting googles results and your settings won’t be saved.
I just did a quick vague test using something notorious such as ‘the pirate bay’ to test the results.
Obviously the google engine fails completely and will lead you down the wrong path but some others won’t.
Since the uncovering of the Bing issue, I’ve used DDG only when I needed to do an image or general video search. For everything else, I’ve been getting good enough results from Peekier.com and the new engine on the block, Yep.com. I’ll give DDG’s android browser another go, after it’s been confirmed to have blocked Bing cookies. In all honest, I prefer Bromite, IceRaven and Vivaldi on Android, though Bromite suffers, a bit, from not having ClearURLs functionality.
Yes, I’m giving DDG a third chance, but if they mess up again, it’s out.
No, I’ve never trusted DDG since the start of the race. An alternative well worth considering is “metaGer”:
https://metager.de/
… And no, the “meta” prefix in the name predates and is unrelated to those sociopaths over at Meta/Facebook.
I do not and would not use DDG’s privacy-focused products, controversy or not. I’d only use a search engine’s privacy-focused products if that search engine proved to be totally independent of its third-party crawlers.
I run six search engines, SearXNG, its [https://searx.tiekoetter.com/] instance, a metasearch engine which aggregates (user’s option) several, many search engines’ results. Note : I prefer the latest SearXNG instances to those of its searX ancestor) : have Bing, Google, DDG itself! and many more Web, Images, Videos, Files and several other specific categories all in one page and free of tracking, what more to ask for?
DDG is nevertheless one of my five other search engines, not to mention two others called with smart keywords only here on Firefox : Qwant and a new one, QuackQuackGo at [https://quackquackgo.net/] or installed at [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/quackquackgo/] which includes only Google Web results (no images, no videos), the latter mainly for the sake of comparing search results with other engines.
To come back to a company’s privacy-focused products…. forget them and do focus, but with the ultimate IMO : ‘uBlock Origin’, the extension, nothing compares to it be it in terms of efficiency, probity.
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Ghacks is a technology news blog that was founded in 2005 by Martin Brinkmann. It has since then become one of the most popular tech news sites on the Internet with five authors and regular contributions from freelance writers.