DuckDuckGo announces Tracker Radar to block online tracking

DuckDuckGo, a search engine and browser maker known for privacy,  announced the launch of Tracker Radar and open-sourced the code behind it.

Tracker Radar is a public data set containing the most common cross-site trackers and details about their tracking behavior, including universality, ownership, fingerprint behavior, cookie behavior, privacy policy, rules and performance data for specific resources and many more. It can be used to generate or research a tracker block list.

One of the reasons DuckDuckGo decided to build its own tracker dataset was that most existing tracker blocklists were manually managed, and the data in them were often older and less comprehensive. Moreover, these lists can sometimes even disrupt the site and hinder mainstream adoption. Thus, DuckDuckGo Tracker Radar was born, which can automatically generate data while continuously updating and testing.

Specifically, the Tracker Radar contains two main pieces of information. One is a file for each third-party domain and contains detailed information about the file; the second is a domain file for each parent entity, which lists all domains owned by the entity.

Faced with the current flood of ad trackers, DuckDuckGo believes that one of the best responses is to use tracking interceptors, but according to their research on privacy behavior, only 19% of people use tracking protection. According to DuckDuckGo, Tracker Radar enables users to obtain high-quality tracking protection, which is currently built into the DuckDuckGo mobile and browser extensions.