When the Accelerated Mobile Page protocol was first introduced in 2015, the search company promised that it would bring faster surfing to handheld gadgets. That may be the case, but what has become clear in the years since is thatAMP has become less about speed and more about ceding more power and more user data to a data-guzzling behemoth.
AMP technology is bad for privacy because it enables Google to track users even more, according to DuckDuckGo.
It was only a matter of time before a way to circumvent it was found.
This week we saw that when the privacy pros at Brave and DuckDuckGo announced two separate initiatives meant to undermine the extra tracking that Google gives to web pages. Brave's new feature, called De-AMP, will be enabled by default in the desktop and Android versions of its eponymous browser. After that post went up, DuckDuckGo took to social media to announce that all of its apps and extensions would protect against the tracking.
The technology on publishers is forced by the use of AMP to further entrench its monopoly and favor its ads on the pages.
The company is correct. While there's a lot to say about the issue, what you need to know is that most of the software used for embedded analytic and advertising tech is controlled by the company. When you try to open a story on a cool news site, you're probably going to open a URL that's hosted by a search engine.
Gizmodo reached out for additional details, though DuckDuckGo didn't go into specifics of how it plans to circumvent that tech. The original publisher's website will be used when a person loads a page using a DuckDuckGo app or browser extension.
Brave offered a better idea of how De-AMP is expected to work. If that isn't possible, the Brave browser will stop loading the current page and redirecting users to a different one.
Brave wrote that an ethical Web must be a user-first web, where users are in control of their browsing and are aware of who they are communicating with. Hopefully, this new update will make it easier.
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