Have you ever opened an email, then when you continue browsing afterward, you encounter an ad about the same product as discussed in the email? Have you ever opened an offer email, then a few days later, you received the same email as if the sender knew that you had opened the email before but did not respond?
If ever, it’s called you’ve been a victim of email tracking practices. This practice is quite common, and it is estimated that about 70% of all emails have a tracker in them (usually hidden in the form of tracking pixels). If you object to this kind of practice, you can try duckduckgo’s latest service. For the uninsured, DuckDuckGo has built its reputation as a search engine focusing on privacy aspects.
This service called Email Protection is an email forwarding service. So you can register an @duck.com email account for free, and every email sent to that address will be automatically forwarded to your primary email. In other words, you don’t need to replace the direct email service you’ve been using all along.
But the most important thing is that before the email is forwarded to your main account, DuckDuckGo will eliminate all saved trackers. So when your primary account receives it, the email is free of trackers of any kind, so the sender won’t know if you’ve opened it or not.
DuckDuckGo ensures that they will not store any information from the Email Protection service users except the primary email address used. All of its privacy policies are elaborated in detail, and DuckDuckGo itself has built its reputation as a search engine that cares deeply about the privacy of its users.
DuckDuckGo’s Email Protection service also offers a feature to create random email addresses, which can then be used to, for example, register for free trials on certain websites. This feature is similar to the iCloud+ service’s Hide My Email feature. The difference is, of course, duckduckgo’s service is compatible across platforms.
So far, DuckDuckGo’s Email Protection service is still in beta, which means we have to register and queue first before we can use it. For those interested, please download the DuckDuckGo app on your Android or iOS device, open the Settings menu, select Beta Features, then click Email Protection and select the “Join the Private Waitlist” option.