One of the very best things about marketing on the web is that, websites can use trackers to track users wherever they go online.
But unfortunately for users, websites can use and utilize any kind of tracker, from the good ones to the bad ones. And here, the privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo wants to expose the bad ones, using what it calls the 'Tracker Radar'.
The tool that been used by DuckDuckGo to power its DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser mobile apps and DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials desktop browser extensions, is essentially a data set of tackers that is automatically generated and maintained through continuous crawling and analysis.
In an announcement, DuckDuckGo said that the tool has been made publicly available to use for research, and for generating tracker block lists.
What's more, the tool has been made open source on GitHub.
DuckDuckGo said that:
"In addition to shopping history, trackers can pick up your location history, search history, browsing history and more, and from those infer your age, ethnicity, gender, interests, and habits. Companies collate this personal data into a detailed profile, continually auctioning you off to the highest bidders."
"One of the best things you can do to protect yourself is to use a quality tracker blocker."
And this is what DuckDuckGo wants with its Tracker Radar.
The tool contains the most common cross-site trackers and includes detailed information about their tracking behavior, including prevalence, ownership, fingerprinting behavior, cookie behavior, privacy policy, rules for specific resources (with exceptions for site breakage), and performance data.
Tracker Radar has two compendiums of information.
First, it has a file dedicated for each third-party domain (usually associated with tracking, but not always) containing detailed information about it. And second, the file for each parent entity, is associated with the domains.
In an example, DuckDuckGo said that it found doubleclick.net on 29,758 of the sites in its survey (68%). Since the internet ad serving services DoubleClick is owned by Google, which has 479 domains in DuckDuckGo's data set, this means that doubleclick.net is being used on sites not owned by Google ~98% of the time.
Breaking the information down, DuckDuckGo shared the percentages of tracker that top 50,000 websites in the world are sourcing from.
They include Google (85.6%), Facebook (36.2%), Adobe (21.8%), Amazon (21.7%), Oracle (20.3%), TowerData (18.9%), AppNexus (15.9%) and Rubicon Project (13.9%).
By opening the tool to public:
- Individuals can benefit from it by using DuckDuckGo apps or extensions, which has a block list based on it.
- Developers can use it to make their own custom tracker block lists.
- Researchers can use it to research the tracking universe.