Episode Details

In this episode, Cristina (SVP, Marketing) and Peter (Director, Product) discuss digital fingerprinting, privacy washing, and how hidden trackers appear in the majority of popular websites. Plus, the steps you can take to protect yourself online.

Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.

CristinaHi, and welcome to DuckTales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology, and people that help provide privacy tools for everyone.

In each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, approach to AI, or how we operate as a company. Today, we’re going to chat about the online privacy problem and DuckDuckGo’s web protections. I’m Cristina. I’m on the marketing team. And today, I’ll be interviewing Peter. Peter, would you like to introduce yourself, maybe what team you’re on and where you spend a lot of your time? ⁓

Peter Absolutely.

Hi, Cristina. I’m Peter. I’m on the product team at DuckDuckGo, which I typically work on our browsers and our privacy protection. So happy and excited to talk about the mystifying world of online tracking and privacy today.

CristinaAwesome, likewise, well let’s jump in. So I think a lot of people would be surprised to hear just how much information about them is being tracked online. Some seemingly irrelevant to what they’re doing and some pretty creepy in how detailed it is and how all the dots are being connected. Can you give some examples of the pervasiveness of this tracking?

Peter Absolutely. know, anyone I talk to about online privacy, the first thing they’ll tell me, and I’m sure you’ve heard the same, is microphones must be listening to them. ⁓ Yeah, everyone can give an example of a conversation in their household where not too long thereafter, they’re seeing advertisements, creepy advertisements, following them around online based on, you know, what it is they were talking about. ⁓ And the reality is the amount of surveillance that happens

is like microphones are listening to you everywhere, but the methods are not actually microphones. The methods are actual trackers on websites, on search engines and browsers and apps, which we’ll talk about that are always collecting information about you. ⁓ So just to break those down a little bit, most people, if you think about someone in their daily life, they’re going to go do a search online, whether it’s on their smartphone or on their computer.

The search engine that most people use is, of course, Google, most dominant search engine in the world. They collect basically anything and everything about you. ⁓ And so that search engine is one source of this data collection. And then ⁓ the browser you use to actually do those searches, often owned by some of the same companies like Google, ⁓ like Google Chrome specifically, these browsers also directly

collect information about you. So if you’re not using a private search or a private browser, a lot of information is directly collected about you. But then, of course, after you do a search and you get onto a website, the websites themselves have trackers embedded in them. And specifically, we’ve done actually a lot of analysis on this. 85 % of the top websites on the