DuckDuckGo Tracker Radar Exposes Hidden Tracking

  • Thread starter ForgottenSeer 85179
  • Start date
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ForgottenSeer 85179

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What is in DuckDuckGo Tracker Radar?

Tracker Radar is actually two compendiums of information:
1. A file for each third-party domain (usually associated with tracking, but not always) containing detailed information about it.

See the documentation for a full rundown, but here is a brief explanation of the major components captured:
  • Prevalence – How common this domain is in our crawl.
  • Sites – The actual count of sites this domain was found on in our crawl.
  • Categories – High level reasons for using this domain as a third party.
  • Fingerprinting – How likely this domain is to be using fingerprinting techniques as a third party.
  • Cookies – How often this domain was found setting cookies as a third party.
  • Performance – Impact of loading resources from this domain.
  • Owner – Parent entity.
  • Resources – Scripts, pixels, and other common resources this domain uses.
  • Subdomains – Subdomains these resources may be found on.
2. A file for each parent entity, associating it with domains.

An entity file lists all the domains that an entity owns. These domains are found in our crawl and cross-referenced with domains and entity names found in WHOIS and SSL certificates. This list can be used to accurately determine when a tracker is being used in a third-party context.
For example, we found doubleclick.net on 29,758 of the sites in our current survey (68%). Since it is owned by Google, which has 479 domains in our data set, this means doubleclick.net is being used on sites not owned by Google ~98% of the time.
Taken together, Google-owned domains are referenced on 93.2% of the sites we surveyed. That is shown above as 'prevalence'.

Even more important is, that someone create a hosts file (for eg. PiHole) which use these domains!:
 

plat

Level 29
Top Poster
Sep 13, 2018
1,793
Me too. Harmless search queries were blocked while using Edge.release. Since I didn't want to scroll thru 4000+ entries, I just deleted the entire thing. A shame, it looked promising. Always looking for innovative new lists.

ddg block.PNG
 

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