this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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45
Duckduckgo App Tracking and listing Sync's "tracking attempts" (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Edit: Below is my original post, will not edit original in an attempt to be transparent as it provides context to those comments. Several good comments outlining what could be going on were posted as well. Seems the list of "know to track" from that service (Google) is very different from what was actually requested by this specific app. 36 attempts so far were made, but DDG does not specify of what type.

Original: So this seems like a pretty intense level of tracking. Certainly much more than any of the other lemmy apps I have tried. I get advertisements, totally fine with them earning money, but it took me by surpise.

If I look at the privacy policy, it certainly does not indicate to me this level of monitoring.

For the record, I am not implying deception on the devs part at all, I am sure things are spelled our correctly in the privacy policy. Just wasn't sure everone was aware of the extent.

Cheers!

Edit: some people are implying I was trying to mislead with my title. For clarity I am using duckduckgo track blocker "App Tracking Protection" and it states "Tracking Attempts" https://ibb.co/DzWMFMy

The list on the original post is what data is being attempted to pull and the protection stopped as far as i can tell.

Edit 2: updated title to be more clear. Wasn't aware I could even do that!

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[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Are those exactly what it’s tracking or what it’s β€œknown” to track?

Former? Bad

Latter? This post is misrepresenting at best and downright malicious at worst.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Hello! Promise no malice intended.

I was just playing around with the app and noticed duckduck go blocking a ton of new tracking attempts.

I can only go by what was stated in the app as "attempts" hence my post.

Someone who understand how duckduckgos tracking blocker work might know better however. Perhaps you are 100% right.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I read this as "Google attempted to track you 28 times. We don't know specifically what they were after, but Google is known (who is doing the knowing I don't know) to track the following information." So basically it's saying Google was definitely trying to get your info, and here's a list of what they might have been after. But it's not proof of what was actually tracked.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

You read it that way because that's what is says.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago

I think that it’s just good for others to know it probably isn’t tracking all that but few go past the headline.

I have no skin in this game. Hell I have an iPhone 14 pro.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

With the little information given here, it looks like that's the information Google is known to track. Which is definitely not new information. Nor is it surprising that an Android app using ads would serve Google ads.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Says "36 tracking attempts blocked ".. So perhaps poor wording on duckduckgos part?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I would totally believe that it blocked that many attempts at IP connections or even potentially grabbing device info. Idk what the duckduckgo product can intercept and reports here. But the UI definitely seems to decouple "we blocked X attempts" from the types of tracking Google is known to do.

My suspicion is that in apps that e.g. include Google and Facebook you'd see both listed with N attempts and similar "here's what Facebook is known to collect."

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

"Known to collect" is going to be vastly different from what's actually being collected. It's more realistically just serving ads, getting some crash/error reporting. But because it's all under Google, it's going to show up as Google. DDG/other blockers won't know the difference.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You do know you can edit titles, right?

You can change it to reflect the reality of what's going on. You can edit the body in the post further, to reflect what you've learned since posting.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Nope I didn't! But now I do. Thanks friend :)

Updated title and added an edit to the top to state what I think was the salient info discussed.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Here's the URL to the dev's privacy policy as listed on the Play Store. It should give a better idea of what he actually does: https://www.iubenda.com/privacy-policy/28463889

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How are you viewing tracking attempts, is it an app?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hello, yes duckduckgo has an app that turned on a blocker to try to strip and block tracking attempts. I keep it running and it seems to catch alot.

What raised my eyebrow was it started alerting on a lot of new tracking attempts for Sync. I mean alot of android apps do the same thing this isn't just for Sync so it's not doing anything unique there. It was also the laundry list of info points that seemed off.

Figured I would post and see if anyone else has seen the same.

I plan on buying the app, I assume those attempts will go away without the ads.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The DDG app is misleading with Lemmy apps, because it will also trigger off of trackers from links you click on. So if you open a news article posted on Lemmy, and that article has trackers, then DDG can't tell the difference and thinks your Lemmy client is the one running the trackers.

Edit: also:

I plan on buying the app, I assume those attempts will go away without the ads.

This is correct, the developer says that the ad framework will not initialize if you have a license to the app.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Good to know thank you. :)

To be fair I had just opened sync, played around with how it looked and scrolled a bit when I noticed this.

I don't recall clicking many links, but I could have certainly. Who knows just by looking at thumbnails soemthing could have been passed through?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I don't wanna take part into all that discussion I'm more interested in why there's so much hype around this app. It's beautiful and stuff but not open-source and I bet there's no gamechanging features.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

It's a very polished experience. Not easy to explain, but it has a lot of knobs and you can get it to behave exactly like how you want. It feels like it's not even there at that point.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

To me it's how it focuses more on the UX - how content is presented and how you navigate and interact with it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

If Sync is using any kind of advertising platform (Google...) -- then this is likely just the things that their Advertising add-in for the app probably wants to track. Highly doubt it's the app itself. DDG is kind of shady in and of itself. They're tracking you too, they just don't do it on the front-end, they do it in the back-end so you can't see it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wait what do you mean, tracking on the back end? Can you point me to any articles on the same?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Remove ads, problem solved.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For those who don't want to pay to remove ads, there's always some pretty great open-source alternatives. Sync is the only app so far to truly care about foldable phones and I wanted to support the dev, so I paid to remove ads but I understand why others might be apprehensive.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

AFAIK there will be an option to remove ads completely using revanced manager soon, but if you can afford to support the dev by paying for it, it's better to do so instead.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I agree if you like the app, support the dev by paying for it. Which after playing around with it more I belive I will be doing.

I do feel bad if DDG blocker is stopping his ads from reporting in, thus stopping his source of income. Definitely not my intention.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Dont use an app that has ads, problem solved.

(Thankfully it's a multiple choice quiz)

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago

There's still time to delete this.