I spent last Friday morning turning around in circles atop a hill in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. I had an iPhone 14 in hand, and I was trying to catch a clear view of the sky so I could connect with a satellite. I wasn’t exactly alone or lost in the wilderness, but I pretended like I was in order to get a feel for Apple’s new Emergency SOS via satellite.
DuckDuckGo’s App Tracking Protection has entered public beta
App Tracking Protection for Android is a free feature from the privacy-focused company that blocks third-party trackers within apps, even when said apps aren’t actively being used. When enabled in DuckDuckGo’s browser, it detects when apps are about to send data to a list of third-party tracking companies on DuckDuckGo’s publicly available blocklist and then blocks most of those data requests. It all happens on the device without routing your data through DuckDuckGo’s servers.
The App Tracking Protection for Android feature was first unveiled at the end of last year via a private wait list for closed beta testing. Since then, a new feature has been added to the tool that allows users to see what personal data is being collected by trackers in real time prior to blocking, including information like your precise location, age, and your phone’s digital fingerprint. Other changes include general performance improvements, and a 50 percent reduction in apps excluded from tracking protection, many of which rely on tracking to work properly.
in a blog announcing the public beta rollout, DuckDuckGo claims that the average Android user has 35 apps on their phone and can experience between 1,000 and 2,000 tracking attempts from over 70 different tracking companies every day. One example cited using just four apps — Southwest Airlines, Zillow, SeatGeek, and The Weather Network — allows over 45 tracking companies to collect