DuckDuckGo Open-Sources New ‘Tracker Radar’ To Fight Online Tracking

DuckDuckGo, known for safeguarding privacy while surfing the Internet, has decided to publicize its information on online trackers to the entire world under the hood of a new tool known as Tracker Radar.

Web trackers are responsible for showing off ads about a product that you just showed interest in on a separate website. But that’s not the only thing they do; trackers also build a digital profile of users by analyzing their actions on the Internet, and the information is then sold to third parties.

The new tool from DuckDuckGo compromises a data set of online trackers from over “5,326 internet domains used by 1,727 companies.” The web browser gaint wants every individual and company to benefit from its knowledge of online data trackers collected over the years.

“Today, we’re proud to release DuckDuckGo Tracker Radar to the world and are also open-sourcing the code that generates it.” DuckDuckGo wrote in a blog post.

DuckDuckGo previously used existing lists of trackers, similar to other web browsers. However, as it notes, crowd-sourced lists are often stale, untested, and could break websites.

DuckDuckGo overcomes these drawbacks with “automatically generated, constantly updated, and continually tested” Tracker Radar.

There is no isolated extension or tool to use the Tracker Radar; it comes in-built with DuckDuckGo’s mobile apps and in its Privacy Essentials desktop browser extensions, available on Google Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.

As DuckDuckGo notes in the blog post, not only individuals but also developers and the researchers can use Tracker Radar’s open source data set for analysis and creating tracker blocklists.