DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg responded to Edwards on Twitter, admitting that "our search syndication agreement prevents us from stopping Microsoft-owned scripts from loading"-essentially admitting that a partnership deal DuckDuckGo struck with Microsoft includes creating a carveout that lets Microsoft track users of its browsers. And we also interviewed the CEO of Protonmail, now rebranded as just Proton, about its ambitions to offer a broader range of privacy-focused services beyond email-hopefully without, ahem, surveillance exceptions for its business partners.ĭuckDuckGo Created a Privacy Exception for MicrosoftĬybersecurity and privacy researcher Zach Edwards discovered a glaring hole in the privacy protections of DuckDuckGo's purportedly privacy-focused browser: By examining the browser's data flows on Facebook-owned website, Edwards found that the site's Microsoft-placed tracking scripts continued to communicate back to Microsoft-owned domains like Bing and LinkedIn. We spoke to the inventor of the browser "cookie" about how to handle cookie settings for privacy-and those ubiquitous cookie-related pop-ups on websites. China has been saber-rattling with accusations about American cyberespionage. Australia's digital driver’s licenses turn out to be far too easy to forge. In other privacy news, we looked at how the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation has failed to meaningfully curb Big Tech's privacy abuses four years after its passage. And more than 40 members of Congress called on Google to stop tracking location data in Android ahead of a potential Roe reversal.
Wade’s protections on abortion rights: A new report this week from the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project laid out all the technological means available to law enforcement and private litigants to surveil those seeking abortions, should Roe be struck down. The milkshake-ducking of DuckDuckGo comes amid a rising awareness of how the stakes of online surveillance are rising as signs grow that the US Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Yes, a security researcher revealed this week that even DuckDuckGo, which markets itself as "the internet privacy company," made an exception for its business partner Microsoft to its browser's blocking of some advertising trackers on websites, sparking accusations of betraying its purported privacy ethos.
After another week of dismally tragic news and moral failures by the powerful, it's good to know that you can at least depend on the small things, like "privacy-focused" search engine and browser DuckDuckGo resisting the temptation to sell out and help corporations to surveil its users.
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