An essential privacy app
Welcome to Advisorator’s Tip of the Week, helping you learn something new from the tech world every Tuesday.
DuckDuckGo’s App Tracking Protection feature is finally out of private beta on Android, letting you minimize how much personal information your apps can share with ad-targeting firms and data brokers.
With this feature enabled, DuckDuckGo automatically blocks traffic to known tracking sources, preventing them from learning about your location, email address, age, behavior, and other info. DuckDuckGo also delivers a summary of what it’s blocked, so you can understand what your apps are doing behind the scenes.
Here’s how to set this up:
- Download the DuckDuckGo app for Android.
- Skip the option to set DuckDuckGo as your default browser (unless you want to).
- In the app, head to Settings, and enable “App Tracking Protection.”
DuckDuckGo will then set up a local VPN that screens for data leaving your device. Unlike a traditional VPN, this doesn’t direct your traffic through any remote servers, and all the blocking happens on the device itself.
As with anything you do to protect your privacy, App Tracking Protection isn’t a panacea. It only blocks traffic to third-party trackers, which means it can’t stop Google and Facebook from collecting information for their own ad-targeting purposes. There’s also a chance that DuckDuckGo may prevent some apps from working as intended. But we’re all just doing what we can to limit unchecked data collection by tech companies, and DuckDuckGo’s app is a simple way to do that.
What about iPhone? With the launch of iOS 14 in 2020, Apple started requiring apps to get your permission before they can share data with third-party trackers. You can also disable this kind of tracking outright by heading to Settings > Privacy & Security > Tracking, then turning off “Allow Apps to Request to Track.”
Still, this anti-tracking feature essentially relies on the honor system, as it doesn’t do any kind of behind-the-scenes blocking. For a more aggressive alternative, check out Lockdown. Its local blocking is similar to what DuckDuckGo provides on Android, and I’ve been using it for years with great success.
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