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DuckDuckGo launches a new email privacy service designed to prevent ad companies from spying on your inbox.
The company’s new email protection feature offers users a free “@ duck.com” email address, which will forward emails to your regular inbox after scanning their content for trackers and deleted all email. DuckDuckGo also extends this functionality with unique, disposable forwarding addresses, which can be easily generated in DuckDuckGo’s mobile browser or through desktop browser extensions.
DuckDuckGo’s personal email is intended for distribution to friends and contacts you know, while disposable addresses are best served when signing up for free trials, newsletters, or anywhere you want to go. think you can sell your email address. If the email address is compromised, you can easily disable it.
These tools are similar to the anti-tracking features Apple implemented in iOS 14 and iOS 15, but DuckDuckGo’s approach integrates into iOS, Android, and all major web browsers. DuckDuckGo will also make it easy to create disposable email addresses on the fly, for newsletters or anywhere you might share your email.
Tackling email privacy has been a major focus for DuckDuckGo as the company advocates privacy-friendly methods for various online tasks. The company started with its eponymous search engine DuckDuckGo and more recently introduced its own mobile browser and desktop browser extensions to remove trackers while surfing the web.
Email trackers exist in over 70% of mailing lists, according to a well-cited 2017 study. Once implemented, they allow advertisers to determine when you open an email, where you are when you open it, and what device you’re using. Removing trackers from email removes data points from lists by creating hidden ad profiles on you, which have become a priority for privacy advocates in recent years.
Weinberg said consumer research has shown that asking people to change email addresses and providers would be a tough argument. So instead of creating a new email service, the Email Protection tool acts as a middle layer protecting access to your inbox.
“Our high level goal is to make simple privacy protection accessible to everyone, wherever they are,” said CEO Gabriel Weinberg. The edge. “So we try to integrate this into whatever browser, operating system or email provider you use.
IPhone users may recognize the concept of a relay email address, a feature Apple introduced with iOS 14 called Hide My Email. When you sign up for an app through an Apple device, your iPhone may suggest a random Apple email address. Emails reach the random address, preventing the app from knowing your real email. In Apple’s iOS 15, the company introduced similar features to confuse email trackers and protect privacy.
Weinberg explains that DuckDuckGo’s email protection is different from Apple’s offerings because it’s cross-platform, which means you have a unified experience with disposable email addresses on mobile, desktop, iPhone, or Android. But it also differs in the way the software zags trackers. Apple loads the trackers on its own servers, which send the wrong information back to the trackers’ servers. DuckDuckGo simply removes them from the email before they are loaded. This difference for most users is negligible, but it is a difference.
Setting up the tool is straightforward. Users sign up through the DuckDuckGo mobile app, going to the Settings page and tapping Email Protection. They can then join the waitlist, which DuckDuckGo says is new because it doesn’t collect an email address – it stores a timestamp in the app that’s used to denote the person’s order online. .
DuckDuckGo estimates that the wait will be a few weeks, after which users will receive a notification to configure the feature. The setup process includes a light reading of the privacy features and choosing a new “Duck.com” email address. One feature that the process emphasizes is that DuckDuckGo neither sees nor logs your email; the deletion of the tracker is done in the memory of its servers (or RAM) and is never written to a disk or a hard disk. DuckDuckGo also created the transfer software from scratch, so that it didn’t have to depend on a third party also processing emails before they reached your inbox.
The Email Protection feature also integrates with the DuckDuckGo mobile browser and desktop browser extension, giving users the option of entering their “@ duck.com” address or generating a disposable address that transmits messages. emails to their inbox. The mobile and desktop browser extensions are linked by opening a link on the Email Protection welcome email in your desktop browser.
From that point on, when the email is received, scanned, cleaned from trackers, and forwarded to your email, DuckDuckGo inserts a small bar at the top of the email to report any deleted tracker. Clicking on this bar allows a user to get more information about blocked trackers or to deactivate a disposable address that has been compromised.
Importantly, while a user can reply to an e-mail he receives on an “@ duck.com” address, it cannot be used to initially send an e-mail, which reduces the usefulness of the e-mail. tool for whitening harassment.
The feature is going into a beta test, and DuckDuckGo is still exploring how it will perform in the real world. The company is also working on a privacy-focused desktop browser, which it hopes to complete by the end of 2021, as part of a larger campaign to offer privacy-focused alternatives for every major business in the world. line.
“Wherever you go online, we want to protect you,” Weinberg said.
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