DuckDuckGo Web Tracking Protections

3rd-Party Tracker Loading Protection

When you visit a website, the web address (URL) in your browser’s address bar tells your browser where to go. What you may not realize is that sites also try to load other URLs in the background while your destination page is loading. Many of those URLs come from other companies, commonly referred to as “3rd parties.”

Sites often embed these 3rd-party requests to support site functionality, but they can also be used to track you. We crawl the web with Tracker Radar to identify tracking requests and maintain our own list of trackers.

3rd-Party Cookie Protection

Believe it or not, web “cookies” were originally designed to be a helpful data storage mechanism. However, 3rd-party cookies have become one of the most common methods of web tracking.

To protect against this, we first block most 3rd-party tracking requests with 3rd-Party Tracker Loading Protection, which stops requests from loading that would otherwise have a chance to create or access 3rd-party cookies.

1st-Party Cookie Protection

Unlike 3rd-party cookies, 1st-party cookies are less likely to be involved in cross-site tracking because they can only be retrieved from the site where they were originally created. This can be helpful when used to recognize that you’re still signed in, but 1st-party cookies can also be used to monitor your activity on sites over time.

To protect against this, we first block most embedded 3rd-party tracking requests before they even have a chance to create or access 1st-party cookies,

CNAME Cloaking Protection

Some 3rd-party trackers disguise their real (origin) domains as subdomains of the website they’re hiding on, so they appear to belong to the website owner (1st party). This can help them escape common 3rd-party tracking protections.

Fingerprinting Protection

Some companies try to combine specific information about your browser and device to create a unique identifier for you. This widespread tracking technique is known as “fingerprinting.”

To protect against this, we block many fingerprinting scripts before they can even load with our 3rd-Party Tracker Loading Protection.

Smarter Encryption (HTTPS Upgrading)

To offer Smarter Encryption (automatic HTTPS upgrading), we crawl the web continuously, look for sites that fully support HTTPS across their entire website, and maintain a list of the sites we find. You can review the open-source code for our crawler.

Link Tracking Protection

The links embedded in websites often contain additional URL parameters after the destination domain. While many of these parameters aren’t used for tracking purposes, others are added to specifically track your behavior across sites.

Referrer Tracking Protection

By default, we “trim” (remove) some of the metadata in the “referrer header” that trackers could potentially use to track you individually.

Embedded Social Media Protection

By default, we block social media embedded content from Facebook on our list of content types, which includes: sign-in buttons, videos, comments, posts, pages, and groups.

Google-Specific Web Tracking Protections

Google AMP Protection

To help protect you against this form of Google tracking, we replace most Google AMP links when clicked with the original publisher’s website so publishers can directly serve you these pages instead of Google.

Google Topics Protection

The DuckDuckGo Chrome extension disables Topics from running in Google Chrome.

Google Protected Audience API Protection

The DuckDuckGo Chrome extension disables the Google Protected Audience API from running in Google Chrome.

Google Sign-In Pop-Up Protection

To help protect against being misled into unwanted tracking, we block these annoying Google sign-in pop-ups by default on sites Google doesn’t own wherever possible.

Preserving Site Functionality

We aim to deliver privacy, simplified. Part of our ethos of simplicity is not breaking website functionality in the process of blocking and restricting trackers.

Surrogates

Sometimes sites depend on code that loads from embedded 3rd-party tracking script requests in order to function properly. When our 3rd-Party Tracker Loading Protection stops these from loading, it can cause sites to behave unexpectedly.

Remotely Configured Exceptions

If you’re using our app or extension and suspect that a website usability issue was caused by one of the Web Tracking Protections detailed on this page, you can let us know by submitting a Broken Site Report.

Infrastructure Domains

Most websites cannot build all of their technology in-house and must rely on 3rd parties for site functionality. We don’t want to penalize websites for using a 3rd party as long as their use of that 3rd party doesn’t help track you across websites.

DuckDuckGo Private Search Ads

Advertising on DuckDuckGo is done in partnership with Microsoft. Viewing ads on DuckDuckGo is anonymous, and Microsoft has committed to not profile our users on ad clicks.

Everyday Privacy Controls

The Fire Button

The Fire Button erases traces of websites that you’ve visited, browsing session information, and permissions you’ve granted to websites.

Cookie Pop-Up Protection

When DuckDuckGo detects a cookie pop-up on sites you visit, we can try to automatically set your cookie preferences to maximize privacy and minimize cookies, then close the pop-up.

Global Privacy Control (GPC)

Global Privacy Control (GPC) intends to help you express your opt-out rights automatically.

How to Get our Web Tracking Protections

To get the privacy protections as described above, install the relevant DuckDuckGo app or extension:

• Firefox: get the extension
• Chrome: get the extension
• Edge: get the extension
• Opera: get the extension
• iPhone & iPad: get the app
• Android: get the app
• Mac: get the app
• Windows: get the app

If you use another Chromium-based browser like Vivaldi, you can usually install the Chrome version.