DuckDuckGo wants to stop apps tracking you on Android - Ars Technica

iPhone and iPad owners could now stop apps from tracking their behavior and using their data for personalized advertising.

Privacy-focused tech company DuckDuckGo, which started life as a private search engine, is adding the ability to block hidden trackers to its Android app.

“The idea is we block this data collection from happening from the apps the trackers don’t own,” says Peter Dolanjski, a director of product at DuckDuckGo.

DuckDuckGo says its analysis of popular free Android apps shows more than 96 percent of them contain trackers.

App Tracking Protection appears as an option in the settings menu of its Android app.

Using a box-fresh Google Pixel 6 Pro, I installed 36 popular free apps—some estimates claim people install around 40 apps on their phones—and logged into around half of them.

The beta of App Tracking Protection for Android is limited.

It doesn’t block trackers in all apps, and browsers aren’t included, as they may consider the websites people visit to be trackers themselves.

In addition, DuckDuckGo says it has found some apps require tracking to be turned on to function; for this reason, it gives mobile games a pass.

While the tool blocks Facebook trackers across other apps, it doesn’t support tracker-blocking in the Facebook app itself.

In DuckDuckGo’s settings, you can whitelist any other apps that don’t function properly with App Tracking Protection turned on.

At the time of writing, Google had not responded to a request for comment on apps using VPN configurations to block trackers across Android.

Other apps on the Google Play Store—including Jumbo Privacy, a VPN app by Samsung, and Blokada—already use similar methods to block trackers, although they also offer wider privacy-focused tools and don’t act as browsers.

For him, blocking trackers on Android is the next step in giving people more control over how companies handle their data.