DuckDuckGo has long maintained a focus on privacy on the web since the launch of its search engine and browser. Now, DuckDuckGo is expanding its free services with a paid tier that provides access to a VPN and some tools for recovering personal information on the web.
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You could confidently say that just about every app on your phone is tracking you in some way – that’s just a side effect of modern tech. DuckDuckGo – a web-search tool turned browser that is famous for putting privacy above all else – is releasing a new App Tracking Protection feature for Android users, now available in beta.
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Following some EU orders and fines, Google has made changes to Android in countries where users can choose a search engine while setting up their devices. However, one search engine, DuckDuckGo, isn’t content with Google’s search-choice screen on Android, and has suggested a change.
For the vast majority of users right now, Google is the go-to search engine on the web. There are a number of other options, though, and after some antitrust complaints in the past few years, Google is making some changes to promote healthy competition. That now includes the arrival of DuckDuckGo as a default search engine provider on Google Chrome.
Google owns a lot of domains for a variety of reasons, but one that has caused headaches for some people has been the domain “duck.com.” Now, Google has released that domain to its search competitor, DuckDuckGo.
Speaking in an interview with CNBC, DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg said that the company’s traffic has grown 600 percent over the past two years. A variety of factors likely played a role in this explosion of growth, but it is mainly attributable to the NSA’s surveillance program, which was revealed two years ago. It has been reported in the past that the NSA tapped into Google servers and accessed the data of millions of users.
For reasons unknown, the anti-tracking search engine DuckDuckGo has been blocked in China. The CEO of DuckDuckGo, Gabriel Weinberg, has taken to Twitter to confirm the block, also saying that it seems the site has been blocked for a few weeks.
https://twitter.com/yegg/status/513657799856115713
It appears that the site has actually been blocked for quite some time now, as can be seen on the Great Fire censorship monitoring website (via TheNextWeb). A search for DuckDuckGo reveals that blockages started appearing on September 4th. Since that day, it doesn’t appear the site has yet become accessible again.
We’ll update this post if and when we find out more.
