DuckDuckGo sees Google's AMP tool as a threat to user privacy
29/04/2022After the presentation of Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), DuckDuckGo has announced that has begun to protect its customers from this new service that they interpret as interfering with user privacy. AMP is a tool that, according to Google, enables fast loading of websites on mobile devices and improves their performance. But DuckDuckGo claims that what it really does AMP is prioritize the display of sites that have adopted it and favor ads from Google on these pages. This is why, this alternative search engine focused on offering the greatest possible privacy to its users (it doesn't collect information from searches) has decided to introduce protections against AMP technology in their applications and extensions for iOS, Android, Mac, Chrome and Firefox and has announced that DuckDuckGo will show the original website of the editor instead of the one adapted to AMP.
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WhatsApp improves security in its desktop version
14/03/2022In accordance with the growing use of WhatsApp in the desktop version and with the aim of guaranteeing users maximum security, Meta has announced that has implemented in this app, a new security layer called Code Verify that acts as an open source browser extension verifying automatically the authenticity of the web code of this application. According to Meta, which has offered this utility to other services to use it, Code Verify allows web browsers to verify that the resources they obtain have not been tampered with. "When someone uses Code Verify, the extension automatically compares the code that is executed in WhatsApp Web with the version of the code verified by WhatsApp and published in CloudFlare", has said the company, who also explains that if any violation or inconsistency is detected , the user will receives a notification, immediately. This new WhatsApp code verification, which Meta has confirmed does not record metadata or user data or share information with the application, will be available in the official browser extension stores for Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox.
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DuckDuckGo introduces a feature to protect Android smartphones from trackers
26/11/2021DuckDuckGo goes a step further in terms of security and has just announced a new tool for Android Smartphones that block the tracking of user data. In fact, it is an extension that can be already tested in its beta version -with a waiting list- and that according to DuckDuckGo was born to stop the theft of information ( according to AndroidRank.org, 96% of the most popular free Android applications contain trackers. A 87% send data to Google, and 68% to Facebook). This free extension is called 'App Tracking Protection' and it is integrated into the search engine's 'app', so it is not necessary to keep it open for it to work. Trackers blocking can be reviewed in real time through DuckDuckGo and it can also detect which networks are tried to keep users personal data to. In addition, one can activate the notifications service to receive summaries of its operation.
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