Gabriel Weinberg is the creator of DuckDuckGo.
The advertising industry was thrown into turmoil at the end of April when Apple introduced App Tracking transparency tools. The new privacy controls have wiped out almost $10 billion from the revenues of several companies.
The tool is coming to the operating system from another company. DuckDuckGo started as a private search engine and is now adding the ability to block hidden trackers. The app tracking protection feature is currently in the early stages of development. Peter Dolanjski, a director of product at DuckDuckGo, says that they block this data collection from happening from the apps the trackers don't own. You should see less online ads that are stalkers.
Most apps have third-party trackers hidden in their code. Tracking your behavior across different apps can help create profiles about you that can include what you buy, demographic data, and other information that can be used to serve you personalized ads. More than 96 percent of the popular free apps contain trackers, according to an analysis by DuckDuckGo. The blocking of these trackers means that Facebook and Google, whose trackers are some of the most prominent, can't send data back to the mothership, neither will the dozens of advertising networks you've never heard of.
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DuckDuckGo's tool is simple to use. The settings menu of the app shows App Tracking Protection as an option. You will be able to access it on a waitlist. The feature shows the total number of trackers blocked in the last week and gives a breakdown of what has been blocked in each app recently. The Daily Mail is one of the world's largest news websites and DuckDuckGo will register that it is blocking trackers from Taboola. An example from DuckDuckGo showed that more than 60 apps had tracked a test phone thousands of times.
My experience bore that out. I installed 36 popular free apps using a box-fresh Google Pixel 6 Pro, and I log into half of them. The McDonald's app, Facebook, and Amazon were included. I left the phone alone for four days and didn't use it at all after seeing a preview of DuckDuckGo's tracker blocking. In 96 hours, 23 of the apps made more than 630 attempts to track.
On a daily basis, you can see a lot more attempts to track. When I opened the McDonald's app, a bunch of companies tried to collect data about me. Clicking on the eBay and Uber apps triggered a tracker.
