At the end of last May, a dark DuckDuckGo secret came to light. Thanks to the reports of a security researcher, it was confirmed that the service was not as secure as it promised. Today, the company has finally come up with a fix. Through their website they confirm that next month they will start blocking Microsoft trackers.
In said publication, DuckDuckGo ensures that Microsoft’s demands are no longer required. “We are happy to report that this is no longer the case. We have not had and do not have any similar limitations with any other company,” they say in their statement.
The main premise of DuckDuckGo is that it allows you to browse the Internet safely. To do so, they block the trackers that you can find on each of the websites, including those of their own or third parties. However, an investigation revealed that Microsoft trackers were not being blocked due to some kind of agreement between both companies.
Apparently a policy required DuckDuckGo to allow trackers to run from Microsoft when using Bing. It is known that this is the preferred search engine used by the service when displaying its private search results.
We were limited in how we applied our third-party tracker upload protection to Microsoft tracking scripts due to a policy requirement related to our use of Bing as a source for our private search results.
DuckDuckGo
Microsoft also offers its grain of sand to DuckDuckGo
Furthermore, it was known that Microsoft was able to extract information from users to click on ads on the web, even if they weren’t from the company. This was part of the aforementioned agreement.
Fortunately, it seems that there is no longer to worry. According to DuckDuckGo, Microsoft Advertising has undertaken not to associate the behavior of users when accessing any internet advertisement. In addition, you may not store the information or share it with third parties.
“When you click on an ad provided by Microsoft that appears on DuckDuckGo, Microsoft Advertising does not associate your behavior toward the ad with a user profile,” the service confirms in its post.
Yes indeed, advertisers will still be able to see the click rate via Microsoft scripts. However, DuckDuckGo advertises that this information is quite limited, so there is nothing to worry about. In case you want to have more security, you can always disable ads within the service settings.