Privacy-oriented search engine DuckDuckGo says it will “protect” from being tracked by pages that enable Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages Framework (or AMP). “When you load or share a Google AMP page from the DuckDuckGo app (iOS/Android/Mac) or extension (Firefox/Chrome), the original publisher’s page will be used instead of the Google AMP version,” the company said say on twitterDuckDuckGo points out that the technology allows Google to track users and force publishers to use AMP by prioritizing those links in its search results.
AMP technology is bad for privacy because it enables Google to track users more (which is already a whole lot).
And, Google uses AMP to further cement its monopoly, forcing publishers to use the technology by prioritizing AMP links in search and favoring Google ads on AMP pages.
— DuckDuckGo (@DuckDuckGo) April 19, 2022
AMP was originally introduced as a way to make mobile web pages load faster — or so Google calls it. But developers and others are skeptical of AMP, with some questioning how Google prioritizes AMP pages in search results.Improvements to mobile sites since the introduction of AMP have made them less useful to publishers in recent years, with many (including edge parent company Vox Media) does not use the framework at all.
The move comes as Brave, another privacy-focused browser, announced that it will also skip AMP-rendered pages where possible. “In the unlikely event that the page is fetched, Brave will monitor the page being fetched and redirect the user to the AMP page before the page is rendered, preventing AMP/Google code from being loaded and executed,” the company said in a blog post. According to Brave’s post, the technology is “harmful to users and the entire network.”
