DuckDuckGo was quietly letting Microsoft’s trackers through its tracker blocking, and it took an outside researcher to catch it. In August 2022 the company said it would stop.
Founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg put out an announcement post after users complained. “I’ve heard from a number of users and understand that we didn’t meet their expectations around one of our browser’s web tracking protections,” he wrote. The company said it would soon start blocking Microsoft trackers in its privacy-focused browsers and extensions.
How it came to light
The exception had been in place because of a search and ad partnership with Microsoft. A privacy and data supply chain researcher found it during an audit. Brave CEO Brendan Eich called it a “revenue quid pro quo” at the time, and said his own company would never do that.
Weinberg explained the carve-out as “a policy requirement related to [its] use of Bing as a source for our private search results.” He said DuckDuckGo has not had, and does not have, “any similar limitation with any other company.”
He also described the tracking protection as something “not offered by most other popular browsers by default.” Thurrott.com, which reported the story, noted that Brave does block these and other trackers by default.
What changes
DuckDuckGo said it would publish its tracker protection list so anyone can see what it blocks and report problems.
The Thurrott writer said the changes “should have been unnecessary.” He wrote that he moved to the Brave browser after the original tracker news and plans to stay with it. Whether the episode causes lasting damage to DuckDuckGo’s reputation, he added, is unclear.
