DuckDuckGo is enhancing its mobile app by integrating its privacy-focused search capabilities, allowing users to perform private searches directly from the address bar.
The niche search engine, which had achieved 16 billion total searches by 2018, is well-known for its commitment to safeguarding user privacy and search history. Unlike major search engines like Google, DuckDuckGo does not track or sell user information.
Previously, DuckDuckGo’s privacy features were confined to its search bar. Now, with updates to its mobile app and browser extension, users can enjoy privacy protection both while browsing the web and when looking up information.
The updated mobile app and browser extension also come with built-in tracker network blocking and enhanced encryption. This ensures that users are not tracked by any advertising networks present on the sites they visit.
Enhanced encryption guarantees that the DuckDuckGo app, or browser with the extension, will always load the encrypted version of a webpage when it is available.
Additionally, the DuckDuckGo mobile app and browser extension now display a Privacy Grade rating from A to F for each website visited. This rating is based on the presence of hidden tracker networks, the availability of encryption, and the website’s privacy practices.
Users can further explore the privacy rating to see which specific trackers were detected and blocked on a given site.
DuckDuckGo asserts that its privacy protection surpasses other private browsing options, such as Chrome’s incognito mode, since private browsing only stops browser history from being saved on the user’s device.
