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Android Privacy IOS Software

DuckDuckGo's Anti-Tracking Android Tool Could Be 'Even More Powerful' Than iOS (arstechnica.com) 31

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Privacy-focused search site DuckDuckGo has added yet another way to prevent more of your data from going to advertisers, opening its App Tracking Protection for Android to beta testers. DuckDuckGo is positioning App Tracking Protection as something like Apple's App Tracking Transparency for iOS devices, but "even more powerful." Enabling the service in the DuckDuckGo app for Android (under the "More from DuckDuckGo" section) installs a local VPN service on your phone, which can then start automatically blocking trackers on DDG's public blocklist. DuckDuckGo says this happens "without sending app data to DuckDuckGo or other remote servers."

Google recently gave Android users some native tools to prevent wanton tracking, including app-by-app location-tracking approval and a limited native ad-tracking opt-out. Apple's App Tracking Transparency asks if users want to block apps from accessing the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA), but apps can still use the largest tracking networks across many apps to better profile app users. Allison Goodman, senior communications manager for DuckDuckGo, told Ars Technica that App Tracking Protection needs Android's VPN permission so it can monitor network traffic. When it recognizes a tracker from its blocklist, it "looks at the destination domain for any outbound request and blocks them if they are in our blocklist and the requesting app is not owned by the same company that owns the domain." Goodman added that "much of the data collected by trackers is not controlled by [Android] permissions," making App Tracking Protection a complementary offering.

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DuckDuckGo's Anti-Tracking Android Tool Could Be 'Even More Powerful' Than iOS

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  • Duck duck go wants all the ad revenue for it self. It barely even marks the search results as ads, so it is hard to see how deep the sponsored results go, maybe half the page. Google wants all the ad revenue for itself, do it is blocking others as well.
    • Re:Ad wars (Score:5, Interesting)

      by RazorSharp ( 1418697 ) on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @11:54PM (#63057328)

      Duck Duck Go ads are Microsoft ads. Duck Duck Go's earnings potential will never be very high because because they own very little of their actual business. The privacy apps/plugins are probably the only things they own, but it's not really clear if those things do anything for them beyond marketing.

      Microsoft's strategy with search is similar to their strategy with PCs, it's just not nearly as successful. Create the illusion of choice—choose between Dell, HP, etc. and no matter what you choose it's Microsoft. In search it's Duck Duck Go, Yahoo, etc. Prop up a bunch of Google competitors that are really just Bing. If an uninformed consumer is picking between 5 brands and 4 of them are yours, you have a better chance of snagging them.

      It would be great for there to be real competition in the search market, but I'm willing to bet if someone made a viable search engine that competed with Google and Microsoft that Microsoft would just buy it.

      • by fermion ( 181285 )
        I don't mind a parasite. I object to a cut-rate one
      • Re:Ad wars (Score:5, Interesting)

        by codebase7 ( 9682010 ) on Thursday November 17, 2022 @06:01AM (#63057630)

        It would be great for there to be real competition in the search market, but I'm willing to bet if someone made a viable search engine that competed with Google and Microsoft that Microsoft would just buy it.

        More like they'd be sued out of existence. A small search engine *might* get under the radar. The second it's got marketshare however, the *IAAs of the world will come knocking demanding mandatory filters, delistings, and takedowns. All of which costs money to implement and maintain, and those *IAAs (and the courts!) will expect the search engine to pay the costs. If they fail to fulfill the *IAAs' demands, it's contributory infringement and punitive damages all they way to bankruptcy. And that's without making any money. If the search engine tries supporting it's business with advertising, then it's a criminal enterprise facing commercial infringement charges.

        Don't even get me started on the various news media that would also be coming after the search engine for sending eyeballs to the media's ad laden "articles". Some of which will be decrying the new search engine as being part of the "dark web." Or the black-hawk mother whose kid found boobs on the search engine while the mother was ignoring the kid.

        TL;DR: Google or Microsoft buying out your search engine would be a blessing in disguise compared to the risks.

  • I've been using Blokada for years and it sounds like DuckDuckGo just took their software and rebranded it? How is this DuckDuckGo anti tracker better? Why should I use it or care?
    • PersonalDNSfilter and some good hosts files. Why over complicate things?

      • by Anonymous Coward
        APK! That you?
      • by Ormy ( 1430821 )
        This. I am a long-term user of both Blokada and later PersonalDNSfilter, I was also a beta tester for Blokada. Blokada is great for less tech-savvy people to just block ads, but it becomes slow and buggy when very large blocklists (aka 'hosts files') are used. PersonalDNSfilter runs smooth and steady even with block lists running into the millions of entries, it shows you every request, and you can long-press on any request to either add or remove it from the blocklist without having to use a text edito
  • by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Thursday November 17, 2022 @01:15AM (#63057384) Homepage

    Why is /. suddenly hating on DDG? Yes, they have ads at the top of their results. The ads are marked as such. You do know that DDG needs income in order to exist, yes?

    FWIW it looks like their blocker works by routing you through a VPN, so they probably do DNS-level blocking. Which explains how they block other apps without rooting your phone. TFA wasn't very clear about that.

  • by locater16 ( 2326718 ) on Thursday November 17, 2022 @01:19AM (#63057398)
    "The power of iOS tracking is insignificant next to the power of routing literally all your web traffic through us!"
    DuckDuckGo
    • "us" isn't some foreign servers, it's still a piece of software running on the local machine, except that they need to use Android's VPN service as there's no other way to control the flow. It's the same as having some ad blocking extension in your browser if we're talking about web traffic or some kind of personal firewall running on your machine if we're talking about all the traffic.

  • I don't see how this would improve over adaway https://adaway.org/ [adaway.org] or the built-in tracking protection offered by /e/OS which run on my devices.

    That said, ddg probably has an immensely larger audience, and while I applaud all efforts to block tracking, I'm always warey when a company living on ads offers to start blocking stuff: for those users who are really after such a thing, I will always advise on independent solutions with no such commercial affiliations.

  • The equivalent on iOS would be 1Blocker, which brings an (optional) VPN to filter all traffic.
    You pay for this, however, and they don’t have a deal with MS.
    I’ve been using this with good results for multiple yers now, BUT, since (on iOS at least) you can only have the traffic go through one VPN at a time, it is useless in some situations.

    https://1blocker.com/ [1blocker.com]

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Same issue on Android, you can only have one VPN at a time. There are work-arounds, like you could set your WiFi AP up to use your preferred VPN. I use Mullvad which does offer decent DNS based blocking anyway.

      I have been testing out the DDG app. Main thing I'm concerned about is affect on battery life, as there have been similar open source firewall type apps that use Android's VPN functionality, but they all impact batter life more than simple DNS based blocking due to needing to do a bit more packet insp

      • Same issue on Android, you can only have one VPN at a time.

        That's not an issue. It's the only way a VPN could "anonymize****" your traffic. You can either catch packets headed to a specific domain / subnet and ONLY that specific domain / subnet, or you can catch all of them regardless of destination. Only the latter can "anonymize****" you and only one of those can be active at any given time. **** / PSA: Virtual Private Networks are NOT meant to be anti-censorship / anti-surveillance tools. They are meant to directly connect a device / network to another device

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Android doesn't have a way for an app to examine all traffic, except for creating a "local" VPN that exists only on the device itself and sends the data out in the clear after it has decided to block it or not. Unless you have root.

          So the VPN here is not anonymising your traffic or otherwise hiding it from your ISP etc.

          That's the issue, if you want to use a "real" VPN to an off-device server you can't have both.

  • FB/Meta will be crying more when this kicks in ! Nobody wants their personal info used. FB/Meat is dying.
  • There is no way Google would allow something like that exist on their Android platform. The only question is how soon and in what way they are going to change Android to prevent this.
  • You are sharing your data with Microsoft when using it - hardly more commendable than sharing your data with Google.
  • The industry failed to police itself.
  • I use the DDG App Tracking Protection on my Android devices and I strongly recommend that everyone with an Android phone should install it. It gives me a report on all the tracking attempts it blocks and what kinds of data they are attempting to send out. There's an amazingly large number of them associated with most of the apps I regularly use, in some cases thousands of blocked attempts. Currently showing more than 52k blocked tracking attempts across 14 apps.

    In many cases the data includes the GPS locati

  • I find it curious that there's an opt-OUT list for advertising (as a refresher, advertising is something which NOONE on this planet wants*, unless they are trying to hilight their service or product or profit from convincing others that advertising is effective).

    (*) Prove me wrong advertising billionaires, switch to an opt-in model :P

    For those non-advertising billionaires, please prove me wrong by hilighting a single case in your life when advertising made you aware of a product or service which you ultima

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