Browser privacy from DuckDuckgo

To the Rescue

DuckDuckgo and others launch an Internet privacy protocol for the entire web.

It can be added now to Safari (I just did) and Mozilla, and other browsers soon.

From what I can understand (and you can fit my tech knowledge in a thimble) it won’t be fully effective until the appropriate laws are passed, but they’re on some states’ agendas and should soon be fully enforceable. Until then, it appears it will offer some protection against sites selling your information to others.

A group of tech companies, publishers, and activist groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla, and DuckDuckGo are backing a new standard to let internet users set their privacy settings for the entire web.

“Before today, if you want to exercise your privacy rights, you have to go from website to website and change all your settings,” says Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine.

That new standard, called Global Privacy Control, lets users set a single setting in their browsers or through browser extensions telling each website that they visit not to sell or share their data. It’s already backed by some publishers including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Financial Times, as well as companies including Automattic, which operates blogging platforms wordpress.com and Tumblr.