As a business committed to Internet privacy, DuckDuckGo has been promoting the brand experience around “trackless web search” for years and earlier launched a privacy browser with built-in tracking interception. But after digging deeper into its tracking protections, the researchers found something embarrassing — DuckDuckGo offered exceptions to some of its search partner Microsoft’s ad data requests.
On Tuesday night, Zach Edwards shared the results of his audit on Twitter, finding that the DDG mobile browser does not block ad requests from Microsoft scripts on non-Microsoft web assets.
IT’S IMPORTANT TO NOTE THAT THIS IS NOT THE SAME AS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A USER ACTUALLY CLICKS ON AN AD WHILE USING DDG – BECAUSE ITS PRIVACY POLICY CLEARLY DISCLOSES THAT ALL PITFALLS ARE FILLED.
Edwards tried to test browser traffic on facebook’s Workplace.com website and found that even though the DDG had informed users that it had blocked Google and Facebook trackers, it did not truncate Microsoft’s browsing traffic on third-party sites.
To that end, he also held several discussions on Twitter with Gabe Weinberg, the founder and CEO of DDG. The latter initially tried to emphasize that DDG browsers do organize all of their content (such as third-party tracking cookies, including Microsoft) to downplay the negative effects, and then tried to dump the pot on someone else’s head (not related to DuckDuckGo search).
THE REALITY, HOWEVER, IS THAT THE EXCEPTION TO THE DDG BROWSER DOES AMOUNT TO THE REMOVAL OF CERTAIN AD DATA FROM BLOCKING RESTRICTIONS ON CERTAIN AD DATA TRANSMISSION TO PLATFORMS SUCH AS MICROSOFT’S BING SEARCH/LINKEDIN SOCIAL.
THIS ALLOWS MICROSOFT TO USE IT FOR CROSS-SITE NETWORK TRACKING AND DELIVERING MORE TARGETED ADVERTISING TO USERS — IN OTHER WORDS, UNDERMINING THE DDG BROWSER’S COMMITMENT TO USER PRIVACY.
Even so, Gabriel Weinberg has repeatedly argued that the problem is blamed on the “search federation agreement” between the DDG and Microsoft, which limits the DDG’s ability to block trackers in such situations.
THE GOOD NEWS IS THAT THE DDG IS “WORKING TO CHANGE THAT.” AS FOR WHAT KIND OF DEVELOPMENT WILL BE CARRIED OUT IN THE FUTURE, PLEASE WAIT AND SEE.