Tracker Radar is DuckDuckGo's best-in-class dataset about web trackers, which list is automatically generated and maintained with continuous crawling and analysis.
While DuckDuckGo is notable for its staunch stance on privacy, with the search engine emphasizing more on protecting web searchers' privacy by avoiding the filter bubble of personalized web search results. It distinguishes itself from other search engines like Google, as it does not profile its users and shows same results to all for a given search query.
Now, the company has made public its privacy tool comprising data set of web trackers from about 5,326 internet domains employed by 1,727 advertising companies.
How the Open Source Tracker Radar can be Useful
The Internet is rife with web trackers which follow users all over the Web, which tracking is against their privacy, and more often serves for ads targeting. These creepy ads powered by hidden trackers, are lurking behind most websites.
DuckDuckGo Tracker Radar exposes the existing lists of web trackers, as previously crowd-sourced lists are often untested, stale, and could break most websites. The new tool will enable developers to build seamless tracker protection into their mobile apps and also for desktop browser extensions for browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Safari.
The company has successfully employed it for seamless search and browsing privately across all of devices, with tracker blocking, private search, and upgraded website encryption available in one package.
What the open sourcing of Tracker Radar means for Marketers?
These Web trackers are responsible for showing targeted ads on a website; and the trackers also build digital profiles for every web user by analyzing their actions, and the information is sold to third-party advertising companies.
So if all web projects are built from the ground up to block all these web trackers, with Tracker Radar providing a reliable list of all the trackers, it will negatively impact on ads conversion.
As the impediment to adding tracker protection is that existing lists of trackers are often manually curated, which means they are not comprehensive. Or even worse, the lists may break websites, which hinders the mainstream adoption.
The search giant aims for every privacy-focused company to benefit from its knowledge on online data trackers collected over the years.
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