Apps are creepy, and you know it. When you download a new app to your phone, especially a free app, it’s no secret the app wants your data. As the saying goes, if you aren’t paying for the service, you are the product. What’s less obvious, however, is just how much of your data these apps take, and how much of your activity they track.
App tracking isn’t a fun conversation, because it acknowledges the problem runs deep. The years of free service we’ve gladly taken from apps and developers has been an unknowing exchange with every bit of information our smartphones generate. These days, however, you can fight back. Apple’s iPhones have a built-in tool to protect from app-tracking, but you won’t find a counterpart in your Android’s settings. The solution, ironically, is to download another app: DuckDuckGo.
How app trackers steal your smartphone data
App trackers are programs that hide inside various apps. As you use the app, these trackers monitor and record everything you do, and we mean everything; They look at what you’re doing on your phone, where you are, and your past activity. Even worse, app trackers can often follow your activity even after you’ve left the app they’re hiding in, which makes them both creepy and invasive.
Why track you at all? Well, it all comes back to advertising and profits. Companies like Facebook and Google want to create as accurate a profile of you as possible, in order to show you more relevant ads and to have more information to sell to other entities. It’s nothing new, but the methods these companies use to go about their tracking can be simply shady.
You might know that Apple introduced a solution to this problem starting with iOS 14.5; the feature, App Tracking Transparency, requires apps to ask your permission before tracking you “across other companies apps and websites.” You can simply disable the ability for these apps the request at all, effectively cutting off their ability to deploy app trackers throughout your iPhone.
Android, sadly, doesn’t have this feature, but that doesn’t mean you need to suffer from app trackers. Instead, you might want to give DuckDuckGo a try; following a private waitlist, the company recently rolled out its App Tracking Protection feature for the DuckDuckGo Android app in an effort to combat the scummy tracking practices companies are pushing on Android. You can hop on the public beta to try out the new feature right now.
How to stop app tracking on Android using DuckDuckGo
It’s OK if you prefer to use Chrome, Firefox, or another browser instead of DuckDuckGo. The app doesn’t require you to actually use it in order to get App Tracking Protection benefits. Once the feature is set up, you can go about your mobile business as usual. When DuckDuckGo sees that one of your apps is about to send your data to a third-party tracking company, it stops that request in its tracks. While it can’t prevent trackers from attempting to request this data in the first place, it can block the request before any data is shared.
Better yet, because the app uses a local VPN connection to work, everything happens on-device. That means no one, DuckDuckGo included, sees what trackers are blocked in the app.
Like Apple’s “App Privacy Report,” the DuckDuckGo app will show you real-time tracker activity it blocks on your phone. You can use this information to see which trackers are associated with which apps, and what data they were likely looking to leech. If you want, DuckDuckGo can send you notifications with summaries of this information, too.
To set up App Tracking Protection, download the DuckDuckGo for Android app, or update yours to at least version 5.143.1. Open the in-app settings, then, in More from DuckDuckGo, choose “App Tracking Protection.” Now, the app will walk you through the entire process, including granting access to the VPN connection.
Now, the feature is still technically in beta, so it might not be perfect. But once it’s live, you can set it and forget it, and trust it to block the many app trackers lurking around your smartphone activity.
[This article was originally published on Nov. 24, 2021 and was updated on Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022 as App Tracking Protection moved out of private waitlist and into a public beta.]