At DuckDuckGo, we don’t track you, ever. That’s our Privacy Policy in a nutshell. To improve our service, we develop completely anonymous ways to understand how people discover and use our products, and this information is only used by us to help identify opportunities to improve our product and understand how well certain ad campaigns are working.
Measuring Downloads Anonymously
You might notice that some download links for our browsers and browser extensions include a source= or an origin= URL parameter in the web address. These parameters allow us to anonymously see where a browser download originated by assigning a string of text to indicate the download source. For example, the parameter might indicate that the download happened from a button on our homepage or from a specific paid ad campaign. These strings are anonymous, as they are not unique to individuals and not associated with any individual identifiers, like an IP address.
We also send the date of installation after someone downloads our browser. This helps us measure how many installs might be tied to ad campaigns that don’t include an interactive URL, such as TV ad campaigns.
Measuring Usage Anonymously
Once the browser is installed, we continue to use origin= parameters in a completely anonymous way to help us understand how groups of people are using the product. Examples of the types of use we measure include number of searches per week, number of Duck.ai chats per week, whether Sync & Backup is turned on, and whether a DuckDuckGo subscription is active.
To achieve anonymity, we use several techniques:
- We apply what’s called "bucketing" to further reduce data granularity. For example, all browser users who perform between 5 and 9 searches in a week are counted as having performed 5 searches. This reduces the possibility that any one user could be singled out due to unique or uncommon search frequency.
- We also apply k-anonymity to the aggregate usage data to eliminate the chances that different kinds of usage information can be linked to one another.
- We stop sending any of this anonymous usage data after 6 months.
Measuring Retention Anonymously
To understand overall user retention (how long groups of users continue to use our browsers), we sometimes use source= or atb= parameters. To find out more about how we use these parameters, visit our help page.