04/11/2024

DuckDuckGo is Taking Its Privacy Fight to Data Brokers

The company is launching its most comprehensive tool to date

For more than 10 years, DuckDuckGo has rallied against Google’s extensive online tracking. Now, the privacy-focused web search and browser company has another target in its sights: the sprawling, messy web of data brokers that collect and sell your data every single day.

This week, DuckDuckGo is launching a new browser-based tool that automatically scans data broker websites for your name and address and requests that they be removed. Gabriel Weinberg, the company’s founder and CEO, said the personal-information-removal product is the first of its kind where users do not have to submit any of their details to the tool's owners. The service will make the requests for information to be removed and then continually check if new records have been added, Weinberg said. "We've been doing it to automate it completely end-to-end, so you don't have to do anything."

The personal-information removal is part of DuckDuckGo’s first subscription service, called Privacy Pro, and is bundled with the firm’s first VPN and an identity-theft-restoration service. Weinberg says the subscription offering, which is initially available only in the U.S. for $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year, is part of an effort to add to the privacy-focused tools it provides within its web browser and search engine. "There's only so much we can do in that browsing loop, there's things happening outside of that, and a big one is data brokers, selling information scraped from different places," Weinberg added.

Please select this link to read the complete article from WIRED.