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DuckDuckGo wants to stop tracking your apps on Android

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At the end April, Apple Presentation of App Tracking Transparency tools it shook the advertising industry. iPhone and iPad owners can now stop apps from tracking their behavior and using their data for personalized advertising. Since the new privacy controls were put in place, there have been nearly $ 10 trillion delete from revenue Snap, Meta Platform, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Now, a similar tool comes to Google’s Android operating system, though not from Google itself. A technology company based on privacy DuckDuckGo, which began as a life private search engine, is adding the ability to block hidden followers in its Android app. It’s a feature called “Android Application Monitoring Protection” spreads beta from today and aims to mimic Apple’s iOS controls. “The idea is that we block this data collection from happening to applications that don’t have followers,” says Peter Dolanjski, product manager at DuckDuckGo. “You should see far fewer scary ads following you online.”

Most applications have third-party followers stored in their code. These followers control your behavior in different applications and help you create profiles around you that include what you purchased, demographics, and other information that can be used to provide personalized ads. DuckDuckGo says a study of popular free Android apps shows that more than 96 percent have followers. Blocking these followers means that Facebook and Google, which are one of their most prominent followers, can’t send data back to the motherboard, nor can the eleven ad networks you’ve never heard of.

From a user perspective, it’s easy to block followers with the DuckDuckGo tool. App tracking protection appears as an option in its Android app settings menu. For now, you’ll see the option to access the waiting list to access it. But once activated, the feature shows the number of followers blocked in the last week and provides details of what has been blocked in each application lately. Open the app Daily Mail, one of the largest news websites in the world, and DuckDuckGo will immediately record that Google, Amazon, WarnerMedia, Adobe and Taboola are blocking followers of the advertising company. An example from DuckDuckGo showed that more than 60 apps have tracked a test phone thousands of times in the last seven days.

My experience clarified that. Using a fresh box Google Pixel 6 Pro, I installed 36 popular free apps, some calculations claim people install about 40 apps on their phones, and half of them are logged in. These included the McDonald’s app, LinkedIn, Facebook, Amazon and BBC Sounds. Then, with DuckDuckGo’s Android follower lock preview turned on, I only left my phone for four days and didn’t use it at all. In 96 hours, 23 of these applications performed more than 630 follow-up attempts in the background.

Using your phone on a daily basis — opening apps and interacting with them — sees many more attempts. When I opened the McDonald’s app, Adobe followers, New Relic cloud software company, Google, Apptentive emotion tracking company, and Kochava mobile analytics company tried to gather data about me. Opening eBay and Uber apps, but not logging in to them was enough to launch Google’s followers.

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