App Tracking Protection Beta is Now Available

DuckDuckGo Android App Tracking Protection has been released in open beta, which helps users block third-party trackers in their phone apps, thus making their phones much more secure and private. 

There is a feature by Apple called App Tracking Transparency (ATT) that is used for iPhone and iPad for third party app tracking in each of their apps. But it has been seen that actually most of the users use Android devices, and that is why this app was enabled. With this app you can have app tracking and all hidden trackers that can be identified as blockable in apps on your Android devices can be automatically blocked.

The Trouble with App Trackers

It has been seen that on average a user can have up to 35 applications on their Android devices, therefore, with this average of 35 applications, they may experience between 1,000 and 2,000 tracking attempts every day and also contact more than 70 different tracking companies, which is a lot.

Example:

One day you are playing a game or an application on your cell phone; then you use another app to check flight prices for a trip; then you decide to check the weather in another application; and finally, you want to know the price of some tickets for a concert, using another application.

With only those apps you were using, you may find that more than 45 tracking companies collect personal data, this data can be like your precise location, email address, also your phone number, time zone, and a fingerprint. of your device if you have that option. They can even get to know the screen resolution, make and model of the device, language, the local internet you use, the provider, among many other personal and contact information.

For these reasons, what is sought with App Tracking Protection, is that now you have much more security and protection of your personal data and information, the app can see exactly what the trackers try to collect, and helps to block that information so that those trackers cannot collect it.

What do the trackers do with all that information?

Some companies like Facebook and Google use all that user information to create a profile so that advertisers and also content targeting companies can influence what you see online and everything that may interest the user.

There are many examples that can be seen regarding this, and even you may have experienced something related at some point. For example, you may start receiving ads about your mom’s brand of toothpaste after spending time at home, or have a lot of ads and content related to something that happened recently in your life or that you once searched for online.

However, this can go much further, not just for ads and advertising, there may be tracking networks that sell your personal data to companies, for example data brokers, advertisers and even governments. All this manages to go further, as we already mentioned, and can cause many conflicts since all this information can be used for ideological manipulation, discrimination, manipulation of personal prices, polarization and many more activities that harm people.

With the application that we are looking at from DuckDuckGo for Android you can protect your search, browsing and email information, in addition to having protection against third-party app trackers, giving you much more security.

How App Tracking Protection for Android Works

You can turn on App Tracking Protection and it will immediately notice when other apps on your phone are about to send data to one of the third-party tracking companies, and block all data sharing requests. You can continue to use your apps as usual, but now everything is protected, and it even works when you’re not using your phone.

In addition, using the application you can get real-time results of the information that the applications have wanted to collect, and you can also receive summaries through notifications. Also, to note, App Tracking Protection uses a local “VPN connection”, so the app will not need to send any data.