It was at the end of May when a hare, or rather a duck, jumped. That was found out DuckDuckGo, one of the great advocates of privacy on the modern Internet, was neither as private nor as transparent as many people thought. But it is intended to be, as the company has just communicated.

To summarize the previous story, in May we learned that DuckDuckGo, known primarily for its search engine, the most popular in the pro-privacy world, but also the developer of other related products such as tracking blockers and web browsers for mobile and PC , was enabling third-party trackingspecifically from its partner Microsoft.

In this regard, it should be noted that DuckDuckGo search engine results are mostly fed by those provided by the Bing engine, Microsoft’s search engine. DuckDuckGo does not anonymize and serves them to its users. That never changed, let it be known. That means it wasn’t in his browser where he contractually let Microsoft’s trackers through.

The admissibility of the contract This only happens – again, as far as known – when DuckDuckGo mobile web browsers are used or – for now – as the intention is to extend this to other platforms – macOS or PC add-ons and Micro websites are visited. So the tracker blocking system turns a blind eye and lets the trackers do their job.

This means, for example, that if you click on an ad provided by Microsoft on DuckDuckGo (they are also an advertising partner), your IP address will be exposed to Microsoft, which is normal. However, whether the extent of this tracking reaches simple access to Microsoft sites, and even to the company’s third-party partner sites, is another matter.

However, as DuckDuckGo founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg explained at the time, extensions and web browsers were blocking cookies of third parties on third party websites, i.e. only cookies Microsoft tracking data has been enabled. Despite the controversy, not only the fact itself served, but also the lack of transparency in relation to it.

But things should change, according to Weinberg now in a post on the official DuckDuckGo blog, the title of which is rather significant: More privacy and transparency to protect DuckDuckGo website tracking.

“Previously, we were limited in how we could use our protection against third-party trackers scripts tracking by Microsoft due to a request related to our use of Bing as a source for our private search results,” Weinberg said. “We are glad that it is no longer the case. We have not had and do not have any similar restrictions with any other company“, he clarifies.

Blocking Microsoft trackers in DuckDuckGo browsers and plug-ins will be implemented in the coming weeks, while the beta versions will take several months to fine-tune. It doesn’t explain how they were able to change what was a contractual requirement now.

Something that has now been modified, however, is that this agreement would specifically commit Microsoft not to use data obtained from DuckDuckGo to track its users. Another case is that one naturally believes it.

Overall, we have to point out the obvious: DuckDuckGo browsers are not the main problem, because although they are quite well-known among users who care about these problems, they are nowhere near the use of the big browsers in the market. , on PC or mobile. Neither are PC browser extensions, as those are actually configurable.

It is the lack of transparency that caused the most concern and so he went to his seeker.

In this regard, Weinberg has announced a new information page that specifies the operation of the anti-tracking protection used in all its products, so that there is no doubt; and ensures that they are working on a method that anonymizes all clicks on a Microsoft ad that appears in a search engine. In the meantime, keep in mind that it can be completely disabled.

If you are a DuckDuckGo user on your PC and want to disable advertising, go to your browser settings, find the “Advertising” option and click the button to disable it.