Today, DuckDuckGo greatly enhanced the quality of tracker information available to everyone with the launch of the DuckDuckGo Tracker Radar.
With very few exceptions, visiting any website results in some form of tracking occurring. It's possible to regain your privacy by using one of a growing number of browser extensions to block it, but ultimately the extent to which tracking is prevented depends upon the quality of the tracker information being used. Tracker Radar exists to enhance that information and offer us all more privacy.
Tracker Radar is actually two sets of information being made available publicly under an open source license. The first consists of a file for each third-party domain associated with tracking, including detailed information per domain on prevalence, categories, fingerprinting, cookies, performance, owners, subdomains, the resources used, and the total number of sites the domain is linked with.
The second set of information contains parent entities associated with each domain. With this information it's possible to "accurately determine when a tracker is being used in a third-party context."
DuckDuckGo launched Tracker Radar for a number of reasons and users. Individuals can take advantage of better tracker prevention because the extensions can now use this detailed information resource. Developers can use the information to generate enhanced tracker block lists, and researchers can use the information to study web tracking in much greater detail.
One thing the Tracker Radar has already revealed is where the bulk of tracking comes from on the top 50,000 sites. Google holds the top position by a clear margin with 85.6 percent of the trackers. Facebook is second with 36.2 percent, and then Adobe, Amazon, and Oracle round out the top five.
If you want to see Tracker Radar in action right now, download the DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser app for your iOS or Android device, or install the DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials desktop browser extension as both already take advantage of the data the Tracker Radar is producing.
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