It is this concept, Weinberg told The Daily Swig, that led to the rapid decision in changing how favicons are managed. The company’s slogan is “Privacy Simplified”. He added that as DuckDuckGo’s services are encrypted and “throw away PII like IP addresses by design”, no information was collected, stored, or leaked. In response to the discussion concerning the favicon telemetry, Weinberg said he was “happy to commit us to move to doing this locally in the browser” and will address it as a matter of priority. Some users requested that the case be re-examined, citing potential information leaks caused by the script choice, considered by some as an inherent ‘design’ flaw or human error.
However, when the issue became public on the GitHub tracker this week, this assurance was not enough for everyone. The script in the Android version of the DuckDuckGo application showed that favicon fetching was routed through DuckDuckGo systems, rather than made via direct website requests.ĭaniel “tagawa” Davis, communications manager at DuckDuckGo, said at the time that the “internal” favicon service was used to simplify the favicon location process, but as the service is rooted in DuckDuckGo’s existing systems, the script adhered to the company’s privacy policy which pledges not to collect or store any personal user information.
The issue at hand is how DuckDuckGo fetches favicons, bookmark images associated with a website domain.įirst submitted as an issue in July 2019, GitHub user Tritonio flagged the offending script, saying: “This seems to be leaking all(?) the domains that users visit to your servers.” However, when founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg woke up on Thursday morning, he was met with a new narrative for the company – one that rode on a wave of concern and criticism relating to a ‘design flaw’ that could expose the information of users.
Privacy-focused search engine makes changes to favicon handling, per user requestĭuckDuckGo is a privacy-focused organization offering a popular search engine that doesn’t store results or personal information, in direct opposition to Google.
0 kommentar(er)
