DuckDuckGo is my personal go-to search engine since I’ve been distancing myself from Google services. The search engine hasn’t always been that great, but it’s made significant improvements in just the past year. Part of the reason DuckDuckGo isn’t as “accurate” as Google Search is because DuckDuckGo doesn’t collect your private data. At least we’re told.
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
So because it’s more private than Google Search, I don’t expect that it will ever be as “accurate” in search results since they don’t parse all of your data to give you results, but I digress. The company has announced a new “Email Protection” service which is now in beta. It promises to remove trackers that are sometimes embedded in your email.
According to DuckDuckGo, 70% of emails contain some tracker or tracking algorithm. These trackers detect when you’ve opened a message, where you were when you opened it, and what device you were using. As with any data collected, these bits of information are being used to profile you and your habits. This is all done to market goods and services to you and influence the content presented to you online.
Here’s what DuckDuckGo says in their press release:
We’re excited to announce the beta release of DuckDuckGo’s Email Protection. Our free email forwarding service removes email trackers and protects the privacy of your personal email address without asking you to change email services or apps.
Most existing email privacy solutions come with significant tradeoffs. You either have to switch email services or apps entirely, or degrade your email experience by hiding all images. We believe protecting your personal information from leaking to third parties should be simple and seamless, like the rest of DuckDuckGo’s privacy protection bundle.
We believe the content of your emails is none of our business, so DuckDuckGo will never save your emails for this service. We don’t need to! When we receive an email, we immediately remove trackers from it and then forward it to you, never saving it on our systems. We don’t even save the headers (e.g., to/from).
DuckDuckGo
The Email Protection service is currently in beta, to find out more and to learn how to sign up to the waitlist, check out this website.
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