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The headline feature in both the DuckDuckGo browser extension and mobile app is a Privacy Grade rating (A-F) information card whenever a user visits a site. The rating aims to let them see at a glance how protected they are, while providing additional options to dig deeper into the details of blocked tracking attempts.
The generated Privacy Grade score for a website is based on the prevalence of hidden tracker networks, encryption availability, and any existing privacy practices, according to the internet privacy company.
The vast majority of websites across the Internet contain hidden tracker networks, with Google trackers now lurking behind 76% of pages, Facebook’s trackers on 24% of pages, and countless others soaking up your personal information to follow you with ads around the Web, or worse. Our Privacy Protection will block all the hidden trackers we can find, exposing the major advertising networks tracking you over time, so that you can track who’s trying to track you.
Together, the privacy rating and tracking breakdowns aim to provide a more effective solution than installing multiple add-ons and apps on each device, while offering a more upfront level of privacy than common private browsing modes. Elsewhere, a new encryption protection feature automatically sends users to an encrypted version of a website when available, rather than defaulting to a non-encrypted version.
As expected, the new software releases also include DuckDuckGo’s private search engine by default. The updated macOSbrowser extension is available now for Safari, Firefox, and Chrome, with the mobile iOS app a free download from the App Store. For further details on privacy measures implemented in the new releases, check out the DuckDuckGo website.
