DuckDuckGo is known to be one of the most popular privacy-based search engines. However, it also has other products that can also help protect users. Now it has launched a new email service, Email Protection , which promises to forward emails without being tracked and to reach the inbox cleanly, without compromising data in no time.
Email Protection, DuckDuckGo’s new email product
At the moment this new email protection is in beta version, but users who want to try this new service can join the waiting list. The goal of Email Protection is to reduce trackers that arrive with an email and can collect data.
How does this DuckDuckGo service work? It basically consists of the user obtaining a free personal address, @ duck.com , which links to another account that will be where we receive the final emails. What the account we create does is clean those emails so that there are no trackers.
From DuckDuckGo they indicate that 70% of the emails we receive in our daily lives may contain trackers . Sometimes they could be used for a third party to obtain data from us and to create a more personalized profile. In this way, in the future, they could include us in Spam lists, send targeted advertising, sell it to others, etc. This is something that most email providers do not avoid.
So what this private mail service really does is act as a filter . We have to create a new free address with the domain @ duck.com provided by DuckDuckGo. The emails arrive at this address and it is responsible for eliminating the trackers, which could be images or links, for example. Later, it forwards them to our Gmail, Outlook or whatever we use and there we can read them with complete peace of mind, without being tracked.
Keep in mind that these crawlers are responsible for collecting metadata . They could, for example, know when we have opened an email, what device we have used to read it, where we are, etc. Basic information about us, but used to create a profile. Beyond knowing if an e-mail is false, we must also be aware that they can record certain data.
DuckDuckGo will not store emails
Something that surely worries users is what DuckDuckGo can do with those emails we receive. The answer is simple: they promise not to store emails at any time , including headers or senders.
The only information that this service will have is the destination address , which would be our email account where we will finally receive the email without trackers. Everything else is automatically removed.
In their official blog they report how we can sign up on the waiting list to try this product. As we have indicated, at the moment it is a Beta version but it will be available to everyone very soon.
What do you think of this new DuckDuckGo service? Do you think it can be the solution to avoid trackers when we receive emails?
