DuckDuckGo has been committed to curtailing online trackers for years. In the first place with the eponymous, privacy-friendly search engine. Now the company is expanding to your inbox. Email Protection filters trackers from incoming emails, so the sender learns less about you.
Trackers in emails are usually not visible to the naked eye and function somewhat similar to cookies. There are services that allow you to add trackers to e-mails, so that the sender knows exactly whether and when you opened the e-mail, from which location and which device. You often do not know that the other person sees this.
Tracking techniques are common in the marketing world, among other things. It is not without reason that many trackers come from MailChimp, a service for drafting and sending (often commercial) newsletters. But Facebook, Amazon and Google also have a hand in it.
forwarding service
To prevent others from learning all about you as soon as you open an email, DuckDuckGo comes with Email Protection. You first create a new email address, which ends in @duck.com. Emails that come in are automatically forwarded to your primary email address. The trackers have been filtered out in between.
DuckDuckGo emphasizes that the e-mails are immediately deleted from the DuckDuckGo servers after this.
It is therefore the intention that you change the e-mail address with which you are registered on websites and online services to the new duck address. To prevent this in the future, it is also possible (within the DuckDuckGo browser) to have a duck address created immediately upon registration. Take a webshop: it will not know your actual e-mail address at all.
Waiting list
For the time being, Email Protection is not just available to everyone yet. Interested parties can sign up for a waiting list in the DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser app for Android and iOS, under Settings > Email Protection (beta) > Join the Private Waitlist.
