Illustration: Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV/Getty/Wikimedia Commons/Fair Use (Getty Images)
When Google first launched its Accelerated Mobile Pages (or AMP) protocol in 2015, the search company promised the technology would bring faster surfing to handheld devices around the world. That may have been the case, but it has also become clear in the years since that AMP has moved less about speed and more about ceding more power and more user data to a data-hungry of behemoths.
Search engine DuckDuckGo tweeted on Tuesday: “AMP technology is bad for privacy because it enables Google to track users more (which is already a whole bunch).”
It’s only a matter of time before some of the major players in tech find a way around it.
That’s exactly what we saw this week, when privacy experts at Brave and DuckDuckGo announced two separate initiatives aimed at weakening Google’s additional tracking of AMP-enabled pages. Brave’s new feature “De-AMP” will be enabled “by default” in desktop and Android versions of its namesake browser (an iOS feature is in development), according to a company blog posted Tuesday afternoon.DuckDuckGo took to Twitter shortly after the post announced All of its apps and extensions are also protected from AMP tracking.
“Google uses AMP to further cement its monopoly, forcing publishers to use the technology by prioritizing AMP links in search and supporting Google Ads on AMP pages,” tweeted DuckDuckGo.
In this regard, the company is absolutely right. While you can read the full attack on AMP elsewhere, what you need to know is that AMP-enabled pages are pages where Google controls 99% of embedded analytics and ad tech by design, which means that when these software eats away at your data, it falls directly into the Google Singer. When you’re trying to open a story on some cool news site, you’ve probably come across one of those sites and just opened a Google URL that hosts the story.
DuckDuckGo’s tweet did not detail how it plans to circumvent the technique, although Gizmodo has been contacted for more details. The company’s tweet simply states that when a person loads a Google AMP-enabled page using the DuckDuckGo app or browser extension, “the original publisher’s page will be used in place of the Google AMP version.”
At the same time, Brave provides a clearer picture of how De-AMP is intended to work. “Where possible,” the company explained in its blog, browsers will “rewrite links and URLs” to prevent users from landing on these Google versions of pages entirely. If this is not possible, the Brave browser will look at the page for a potentially AMPized code rendering – if found, it will stop loading the current page and redirect the user to the “real” version of the site, all in The page is even fully rendered before it appears.
“An ethical web must be a user-first web, where users control their browsing and know who they are communicating with,” Brave wrote on its blog. Hopefully this new update will make that a little easier.
