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DuckDuckGo Will Block All Login Pop-Ups with Google

The DuckDuckGo browser and all its apps and extensions will block pop-ups asking user to sign in with your Google account.

The fact is that the developers of DuckDuckGo are convinced that this is one of the Google methods of data collection. The company said that the new lock will work in apps and extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Brave and Microsoft Edge.

Let me remind you that we also wrote that DuckDuckGo Browser Will Block Microsoft Trackers, and also that Brave and DuckDuckGo help users fight Google tracking.

The media also reported that DuckDuckGo downgraded Russian state media in search results.

The option of single sign-on to sites through Google was introduced for the convenience of users, so that they can quickly sign in to different platforms using their Google account (instead of creating new accounts and different passwords for sites). The obvious downside to this practice is that it gives Google the ability to track the sites and apps that users enter.

Although Google assures that “data from Sign In With Google is not used for advertising or other non-security purposes,” the developers of DuckDuckGo say that their own tests have shown that Google does collect user data through this mechanism.

Look at the results of our tests in the attached image, which shows that Google collects data when you sign in through Sign In With Google. For example, on investing.com, many requests go to https://securepubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/ads?. The full URL of the page is included in the request parameters. If we did not use Google sign-in during the tests, the DSID cookie sent with these requests was set to NO_DATA. If we signed in with Google, the DSID cookie had a long hexadecimal value. In the attached image on the left, we are signed in with Google, and on the right, we did not use Google to sign in.the developers of DuckDuckGo told Bleeping Computer reporters.

DuckDuckGo and popups

Since DuckDuckGo considered this behaviour to be a privacy risk, the company decided to take a rather aggressive approach and completely block Sign In With Google requests, preventing users from using this mechanism.

Bleeping Computer reports that the blocking is built into the general protection feature in the browser extension, so when the extension is active, all tips from Google are automatically blocked. The same applies to the DuckDuckGo browser for macOS, where the feature is built into “Protection”: there’s no way to turn it off without completely abandoning all privacy protections.

DuckDuckGo and popups

However, the developers expect that the new functionality of DuckDuckGo products will not cause problems for people who use Sign In With Google to sign in to sites, as this sign-in method will still be available on the relevant pages. The annoying pop-ups will just stop appearing.
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Daniel Zimmermann

Daniel Zimmermann has been writing on security and malware subjects for many years and has been working in the security industry for over 10 years. Daniel was educated at the Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany and currently lives in New York.

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