DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials Extension Enhances Online Privacy

DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials is a new web browser extension that promises to enhance your online privacy as you browse through different websites in your favorite web browser. The extension works for three most popular web browsers – Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.

After installing this extension in your web browser when you visit a website, it checks three things – whether the website is using secure connection (HTTPS), how many trackers are present on the website and how clear is the privacy policy of that website. Based on these three criteria, DuckDuckGo gives a grade to every website. The grades can be from A to F (just like in your school exams). A website with grade A is using the best possible privacy practices and a website with F has adopted the worst possible privacy policies.

DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials

If a website does not offer HTTPS by itself, then this DuckDuckGo extension attempts to force secure connection to make it more secure. Similarly, if there are known trackers present on a website they are automatically blocked. Taking these steps, the grade of the websites is improved by DuckDuckGo extension. So if you visit a website for which the calculated grade is C, the DuckDuckGo extension can boost it to B or even A by blocking trackers or enforcing the secure connections or both.

What if you visit often and you do not want the DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials extension to block anything in that site? It allows you to whitelist all of your favorite sites so that you can use them without worrying about anything getting blocked by DuckDuckGo extension. For this, you can click on the DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials icon in the toolbar and then turn off Site Protection for that website. You can view a list of all the whitelisted websites in the settings for this extension.

DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials

Conclusion: DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials can improve your online privacy when visiting various websites. It does it by enforcing HTTPS and blocking trackers. If blocking trackers can break certain elements in some of the websites, it allows you to whitelist those sites.

DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials in Google Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/duckduckgo-privacy-essent/bkdgflcldnnnapblkhphbgpggdiikppg.

DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials in Mozilla Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-for-firefox/.

DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials in Apple Safari: Just Visit DuckDuckGo to get the link.

2 comments

  1. Hi, I wanted to correct you on the point about Privacy Essentials for Safari – you can go to DuckDuckGo.com in Safari and scroll down for a link to install Privacy Essentials for Safari.

    It already exists!

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