DuckDuckGo has taken action against third party tracking scripts from Microsoft who got this alternative search engine into trouble a few months ago. It should be remembered that in May, DuckDuckGo admitted that its mobile browser, whose great strength is its commitment to privacy, did not block certain Microsoft trackers, confirming the findings of data researcher Zach Edwards.
This special exception for the Windows giant was due to “contractual commitments to Microsoft,” as DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg put it. what was controversial. Finally, after more than two months of this discovery, DuckDuckGo said that the complete blocks would be added to stop the tracking of the Redmond firm.
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Using Bing as a source
“Previously, we were limited in the way we we could apply our third-party tracker upload protection in Microsoft tracking scripts due to a policy requirement related to our use of Bing as a source for our private search results”, is what they have explained from the company who say that this exception was not made by any other company.
Microsoft scripts from bat.bing.com, used to measure the effectiveness of web ads, will now not be blocked by DuckDuckGo’s mobile browser if they are obtained by an advertiser’s website after an ad click by DuckDuckGo. That is, if you click on an ad on a search results page, you access the advertiser’s website and it extracts a script from bat.bing.com to detect and record whether what has been requested subsequently is a result of that ad. ad, the browser will not block that script.
In other words, DuckDuckGo and Microsoft are advertising partners. Therefore, if you access an advertisement provided by Microsoft on DuckDuckGo, your IP address will be revealed to the Microsoft service. But this can be avoided now.
“For anyone who wants to avoid this, it is possible to disable ads in DuckDuckGo search settings”the company said, adding that it is working on removing support for bat.bing.com with alternative non-profile ad conversion tracking.
Later this week, the company is expanding “third-party tracking scripts that we block from loading on websites to include scripts from Microsoft in our browser apps (iOS and Android) and our extensions. browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge and Opera)”. Beta apps will follow in the next month. This expands our third-party tracker loading protection, which blocks the loading of identified tracking scripts from Facebook, Google, and other companies on third-party websites, to now include third-party Microsoft tracking scripts.