The search engine DuckDuckGo, which is dedicated to safe browsing ,has decided to make information about online trackers public worldwide, through a new tool called Tracker Radar.
Web trackers are the ones that display ads relevant to a user. But that's not their only mission. They often also create a digital profile of users, tracking their searches and their movements on the internet in general, and then supplying this information to various companies.
new tool reveals a dataset of online trackers from “5,326 websites used by 1,727 companies.” The company hopes that this will give every user and company access to the knowledge it has about the data collected by online trackers.
“Today, we are proud to launch the DuckDuckGo Tracker Radar worldwide and also open-source the code that creates it,” the company said in a blog post.
Until recently, DuckDuckGo used existing tracker lists, as do many other browsers. However, as he notes, these public lists are often old, unverified, and could cause problems for a website.
To avoid these issues, DuckDuckGo uses the “Tracker Radar” that is automatically created, updated, and constantly monitored.
Tracker Radar comes integrated with DuckDuckGo's mobile apps and Desktop Essentials browser extensions, available in Google Chrome, Firefox , and Safari.
As DuckDuckGo notes in its post, not only ordinary users, but also developers and researchers can use Tracker Radar's open-source dataset for analysis and creation of tracker blocklists.
