DuckDuckGo App Tracking Protection for Android is Now Available

One year after it launched in open beta, and two years after it launched in a private beta, DuckDuckGo App Tracking Protection, a feature of the DuckDuckGo web browser for Android, is now generally available.

“App Tracking Protection is now out of beta,” DuckDuckGo announced on Twitter. “It’s a free feature in the DuckDuckGo Android browser that helps block 3rd-party trackers in the apps on your phone (like Google snooping in your weather app).”

As the company explains, a phone with 35 apps can experience between 1,000 and 2,000 tracking attempts every day, with trackers collecting your location, email address, phone number, and other personal information. “If you’ve ever thought your phone might be listening to you, this is one reason why,” it says. App Tracking Protection in DuckDuckGo for Android thwarts this behavior by working in the background and blocking requests from other apps to send data to any of the tracking companies in its app tracker dataset.

App Tracking Protection also provides a real-time view of its activities so you can see the tracking networks associated with each app and what data they’ve tried to collect. You can optionally choose to receive automatic summaries of these activities as well.

The DuckDuckGo web browser for Android is free and can be downloaded from the Google Play Store.