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DuckDuckGo announced a new three-in-one subscription service on Thursday, Privacy Pro, that it hopes will help customers further protect their privacy online. The bundle includes a dedicated VPN, a personal information removal service, and identity theft restoration. But is it worth adding another $10 subscription to your monthly bill? Honestly, it might be.
As DuckDuckGo just announced this suite, I haven't had a chance to test out this new VPN. But based on DuckDuckGo's description, it sounds pretty standard. The VPN will, of course, encrypt your internet traffic, so neither your ISP nor DuckDuckGo will see what you're up to. The company developed and runs this VPN, though it does use the open-source WireGuard protocol to encrypt your traffic. It also claims it does not log any data that can connect you to the things you do online, including any DuckDuckGo services. You can run the VPN on up to five devices at once, via the DuckDuckGo browser.
DuckDuckGo says it uses VPN servers in the United States, Europe, and Canada, and that it'll be increasing its servers in the future. Take note that you connect to the closest server to your current location by default (DuckDuckGo says its does this for internet speed purposes), but you can manually adjust your server yourself. If you want to watch Netflix from a server based in Europe, or you just want your server as far away from your real location as possible, make sure to change it.
When you subscribe, you also get DuckDuckGo's personal identification removal service. This function looks for your information across common data brokers, and, if it finds any, requests that the site owners remove it on your behalf. Then, it continues to scan the internet looking for more data. You can check in on the data DuckDuckGo has removed from a dashboard in your browser. This service needs to be set up on a Mac or PC at the start.
The company didn't come up with this service out of nowhere: It acquired the personal information removal service Removaly in 2022. That's one way to get ahead.
Finally, if you pay for the privilege, DuckDuckGo will try to help you get your identity back if it's stolen. This service is provided by Iris Powered by Generali, which will work with you to create a case in the event your identity is stolen. There's actually a lot it'll do: Iris will freeze your credit, help you replace important documents like your driver's license and passport, provide a cash advance of $500 if you're more than 100 miles from your home, contact healthcare companies about any fraudulent claims in your name, and reimburse some purchases you make while trying to get your identity back.
DuckDuckGo claims seeking out other companies to subscribe to these services separately could cost up to $30 per month, while The Duck is charging $9.99 per month, or $99.99 per year (about $8.33 per month when you break it down that way).
While adding another $10 monthly fee to your presumably long list of subscriptions might seem like a big ask, this plan seems to be fairly priced. If you're someone who cares deeply about your privacy while using the internet and would sign up for these three services individually, you'd probably have a hard time cobbling together a similar situation for $10. A VPN will run you anywhere $5 to $14 per month alone; a personal information removal service could run anywhere from $4 to $10.75 per month (that $10.75/month being DeleteMe); while an identity theft restoration service goes for $7.50 to $9.
There aren't too many privacy bundles like this out there, at least not that I've seen. Some, like NordVPN, offer dark web monitoring, but not to the level DuckDuckGo is advertising here.
That said, if you don't care all that much about personal information removal or identity theft restoration, and you just want a solid VPN, you have your options, some of which are less expensive than DuckDuckGo. Of course, there are even free VPNs, but those are usually far less effective than paid options, either because they're far more limited, or because they risk your privacy in ways paid options do not.
My advice? Try it out if you're interested, but stick with the monthly plan over the annual. You're better off shopping around different VPN and privacy services until you find one you really like, rather than risk locking yourself into a year of something you don't. If DuckDuckGo's VPN turns out to be on par with others like ExpressVPN or CyberGhost, the extra security features will just be welcome bonuses.
You can sign up for DuckDuckGo Privacy Pro here.
Check out our favorite paid VPNs here:
Mullvad: £5 per month
IVPN: $6 per month (standard), $10 per month (pro)
ProtonVPN: free, $10 per month (paid)
Surfshark: $13.99 per month
CyberGhost: $12.99 per month
ExpressVPN: $12.95 per month
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Modern cars are kind of incredible. Getting behind the wheel of a new-ish car is like climbing into the cockpit of a spacecraft—especially if you’re old enough to remember when having a cassette player installed was the height of car luxury. These days, most cars offer navigation, touchscreen interfaces, music streaming, roadside assistance, and even assisted-driving features. They can tell you when you’re drifting out of your lane, when you’re exceeding the speed limit, and when something is dangerously close.
Unfortunately—and not surprisingly—they can also tell a lot of other people those things, along with an alarmingly long list of other stuff about you, your driving habits, and other information. The situation is so bad that cars have been called the “worst product category” in terms of privacy—which is saying something, in a world where smartphones and smart TVs exist.
If your car is relatively new, it’s been designed as a spying superstar—modern cars typically have microphones, cameras, and tons of sensors collecting data. But it’s not just the sensors built into the car itself—there are also all the apps installed on the car’s interface, plus all the apps installed on your phone, which you probably link to the car via Bluetooth, giving away all sorts of privacy in the process. That means car manufacturers can potentially know the music you listen to, things you say inside the car, and the locations you look up on map apps. We’re firehosing private information to a car maker; we just don’t think about it. In fact, some car manufacturers even admitted to tracking your sexual activity in relation to your car, along with health data.
One immediate way this can impact you is with your insurance rates. General Motors was caught transmitting information from their cars to Lexis Nexis, a data broker that works with insurers to create risk profiles. The information included the dates and duration of every trip the driver took, the distance driven, and a record of hard braking, exceeding the speed limit, or taking turns too fast. The data was then used to raise drivers’ insurance rates—often to the mystification of drivers, who had no idea what their insurer was basing the new rates on.
After an outcry, GM stopped sending the data to Lexis Nexis—but it still has that data, and still has the capability to send it anywhere it wants, usually without alerting you.
Another way your data is being weaponized against you is advertising: It shouldn’t be a shock that your driving habits, destination history, and probably everything else can and will be sent to data brokers who in turn sell it to advertising partners. The end result is creepily targeted ads that know all about your driving habits and all kinds of associated data. And car manufacturers can also share your data with law enforcement, usually without your consent.
There can be a good use for this data, of course—diagnostic data can be sent to repair shops, and location data can be supplied to emergency services. But it’s the total lack of awareness that makes this so dangerous: You don’t know what’s being collected, how it’s being collected, or how it’s being used for or against your interests.
So! Your car is a privacy nightmare. What can you do about it?
Request reports. You can contact Lexis Nexis and request a consumer disclosure report, as well as Verisk, which offers similar services. Legally, they have to provide this upon request, and it will show you—in terrifying detail—how much data has been collected about your driving habits, if any. You can also plug your car’s vehicle identification number (VIN) into Vehicle Privacy Report and get a rundown of what data is being collected and by whom.
Opt out. Go through your vehicle’s interface settings and look for any privacy- or advertising-related options. While you might want to send some data to your car manufacturer (so they can relay information to emergency services, for example), disable anything that looks at all suspicious. If there’s a separate car app on your phone, dig into that as well and do the same.
Contact the manufacturer. You might get more done if you contact your car’s maker directly. Most car companies have web pages set up where you can opt out of data collection (General Motors’ is here, for example, and this page has a list of similar pages for other manufacturers). You can also call their customer service line and opt out with a real, live person.
Contact your insurer. Ask them if they buy data like this and use it to assess your risk. You can’t make them stop, but if they are doing this you might consider finding a new insurance company that explicitly doesn’t do this.
Telegram wants to give you a subscription to Premium for free. If you enjoy the app, and want to take advantage of additional features like 4GB file uploads, faster download speeds, and premium stickers, that offer might seem enticing. Just know, though, if you accept, you're throwing your privacy and security out the window.
As reported by TechCrunch, Telegram is offering users a free subscription to Premium in exchange for a ridiculous ask: The company wants to use your phone number as a relay for other users trying to log into their app with SMS-based 2FA. According to the terms of the program, you agree to allow Telegram to use your number as a relay for up to 150 OTP (one-time password) SMS messages per month, of which you are responsible for paying. Depending on your region, it's possible this could cost more than Telegram Premium itself. Of course, if you have an unlimited texting plan, it won't cost you anything.
But more troubling is that Telegram acknowledges that the user receiving a OTP SMS-code from your relay may be able to see your phone number, and that the company has no way of preventing this. On top of that, "Telegram will not be liable for any inconvenience, harassment or harm resulting from unwanted, unauthorized or illegal actions undertaken by users who became aware of your phone number through P2PL." Cool.
It seems possible, too, that you'll be able to see recipients' phone numbers as well, as Telegram forbids you from contacting them when using this program, even if they reply to you.
Sure, privacy is dead, and our phone numbers are likely floating around the internet anyway. But why add onto that, especially when you are essentially handing strangers your number? The strangers could potentially use your phone number to send you spam or malware, or mine for more of your personal data online. It just seems like a completely unnecessary exposure of personal information from both sides, just for the privilege of accessing additional Telegram features for free.
Right now, the offer is rolling out to Android users in a limited number of regions, so it isn't a particularly widespread program. However, if you do receive an offer from Telegram, I strongly recommend ignoring it. If you really want Telegram Premium, pay for it with money, not your privacy.
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If you run a WordPress website or have a blog on Tumblr, you've probably produced and published a sizable amount of content there. While we all know the internet isn't "private," you probably posted those texts and images thinking they were yours, and wouldn't be stolen by the very companies you relied on to host them.
As it happens, WordPress and Tumblr are preparing to do just that. As first reported by 404 Media, the parent company for both sites sites, Automattic, has a entered into a deal to sell user data from Tumblr and WordPress to AI companies like Midjourney and OpenAI. The AI companies intend to use the data to train their systems.
As if that weren't bad enough, preparations for the sale went poorly, and it seems large categories of Tumblr posts that weren't supposed to be sold were added to the mix anyway. That data includes:
Private posts from public accounts
Posts on deleted or suspended accounts
Unanswered asks
Private answers
Explicit posts
Posts from partner accounts, like ad campaigns where Tumblr doesn't own the rights. (Apple is specifically named here.)
It's possible this data was not actually sent to OpenAI and Midjourney, and that it was simply identified and cleared for that use. However, 404 Media could not confirm this. They could confirm, however, that password-protected posts, direct messages, and media identified as CSAM were not in the bunch. So...that's good.
Automattic specifies that only WordPress.com sites are affected by this data scraping, as opposed to content created on the WordPress CMS that you might use with a site hosted elsewhere. In theory, your WordPress CMS sites not hosted with Automattic should be safe from these actions.
That said, 404 Media could not confirm whether using Automattic plugins like JetPack would bring a self-hosted site into Automattic's scummy data-sharing policies.
A source tells 404 Media that Automattic will be adding a new setting for its properties on Wednesday to allow users to opt-out of selling and sharing data with third-party companies. The outlet received a copy of a new FAQ section, which details that this opt-out option will block crawlers from accessing your sites if you enable it "from the start." If you choose to opt-out later, Automattic will contact partners and "ask" that they remove your content from their datasets and training.
This wording is not particularly encouraging. However, whenever Automattic does release this opt-out option, I suggest you use it on your Tumblr and WordPress sites anyway.
Following the 404 Media piece, Automattic published a statement saying it blocks major AI platform crawlers, and updates its lists to add new ones; has features to block search engines from indexing your sites, which can also discourage AI crawling; and that they only share public content hosted on WordPress and Tumblr from sites that haven't chosen to opt-out. That said, they admit no laws exist to prevent crawlers from abiding by these preferences, and that they are working with certain AI companies, "as long as their plans align with what our community cares about: attribution, opt-outs, and control."
Companies like Midjourney and OpenAI require huge datasets to train their AI systems. Programs like Midjourney and ChatGPT wouldn't be possible without pushing enormous amounts of information their way: It's how they "learn" how to do the things they do.
So your WordPress blog posts filled with your favorite recipes can be fed to generative AI models to train them on how to "talk" about food (or anything at all); your photo dumps on Tumblr can train models on how to recognize subjects like a car or a bird. The data from all your sites, plus the sites of millions more users, is invaluable to AI companies, which means it's extremely valuable to the companies that own those sites, and can sell it. Automattic will likely make a ton of money on this deal, just as Reddit will likely make a ton of money on its own AI content licensing deal with Google.
It's fun to post and share on the internet, but it might be about time to take back what's yours: If you don't own the platform you're sharing your original ideas on, consider taking them to one that you do own, before your ideas become training wheels for artificial intelligence.
It’s one thing to be vaguely aware that privacy no longer really exists. We live in a world filled with doorbell cameras, so your chances of turning up in random TikToks or YouTube videos are never zero, after all. But most people assume that there’s a clear line between what we consider our personal business and the information available in public records. But the truth is that line isn’t much of a line at all—you don’t have to be a billionaire with a private jet to experience the joys of public records.
If you’ve ever Googled an old school friend out of curiosity you’ve probably gotten a bunch of results back from sites like Spokeo or Whitepages promising to generate a report that lists everything about that person. Maybe you thought it was a scam, but those sites can actually offer you a ton of information about just about anyone, because there’s a lot more information about you in public—and publicly accessible—records than you might think.
So what’s in public records? A lot. The basics—your name, birthday, home address—certainly. But also most probably stuff like
your driver’s license number and status
your Social Security number
traffic fines and accidents
your voter registration
your marital status
your home address
employment history
your photo and physical description
the names of your immediate relatives, spouse, and children
property records including liens, foreclosures, and mortgages
arrest records
Some of this is obvious. If you’ve ever maintained a LinkedIn profile, your work history, photo, and contact info was likely scraped and repackaged. If you list your home for sale, everyone in your neighborhood can know about it immediately when your house shows up on Trulia or Zillow.
But you might imagine that things you don’t voluntarily post online would remain private. For example, if you get into financial trouble and your home is foreclosed on, you’re probably not posting that to Facebook with a frowny face emoji, so you might expect it to remain private. But you’d be wrong. If someone wants to know if you’re in foreclosure on your home, it’s very easy to find all that information, too. By triangulating mortgage, foreclosure, and court records you can assemble a pretty clear picture of someone’s financial state without violating a single law.
One reason this is so easy? The government is actively selling your information via that beloved institution: The DMV. In order to obtain a driver’s license, you have to submit a lot of personal information to your state’s Department of Motor Vehicles or equivalent, and they actively and enthusiastically sell that information to third parties. That alone makes it insanely easy to find out most of this stuff. And anything classified as a public record is legally accessible by anyone—otherwise it wouldn’t be considered public.
So details about your life are in public records. What can you do about it?
Not a ton. Agencies like the DMV aren’t going to scrub your personal data because they need that to perform their function, and they’re not going to stop selling your data until the laws change. And once information from social media is scraped, there is no way to unscrape it. But there are a few things you can do to remove private information from at least some public records:
People-search sites. You probably know about sites like Spokeo, Intelius, or WhitePages where you can search public records for people. These sites often have a surprising amount of information available about you. They also all offer tools to have your information removed from their database, so you can often search for opt-out pages and privacy tools pages on those sites to scrub some of your information from the Internet.
Remove unused profiles. If you have old social media profiles or online memberships that you no longer use, remove them. Most platforms offer some form of account removal, and getting this data off the public-facing Internet is a small step towards controlling the publicly available information about you. While you’re at it, switch social media accounts to private if you can.
You should also reach out to the Internet Archive. This invaluable service preserves web pages for posterity, but old social media profiles, personal websites, and other artifacts of your prior online lives are often preserved as well. You can request their removal pretty easily, but the Archive warns it makes no guarantee it will comply.
Contact government agencies, banks, and other entities. It can be extremely difficult to remove public information from government sites, but there are some actions you can pursue. Many states will obscure or block your voter registration information if you fit certain criteria, for example. If you resolve a foreclosure, you can (and should!) ask your lender to remove the Notice of Default, though this may not propagate to real estate sites in a timely manner (or at all). You can also try to get real estate listings of your home taken down, and you can ask Google to blur your house, though sites like Zillow probably won’t be willing to remove your home from their database. Depending on where you live, you may be able to request that identifiable information like phone numbers and Social Security numbers be removed from public records. You can visit your local County Clerk and ask to see the public records you appear in, and request their removal. Your mileage will vary.
That’s about all you can do. Public records are persistent and play a vital role in local governance, so you won’t be able to remove everything—and the stuff you might be able to remove will require a lot of work.
And then constant vigilance, because the chances that your information just pops up again some time later are pretty good. To combat that, you can consider paying for a service like DeleteMe or PrivacyBee, which will monitor people search sites and other online repositories for your personal information and automatically request its removal. These services cost money (ranging from $8 to $20 per month), but knowing someone is opting you out of online databases on your behalf can help you sleep at night.
Just being aware of what’s out there is useful, though. At least you’ll know just how little privacy you actually have, and what people can find out about you with minimal effort.
We all know algorithms run our digital lives, but rarely can we peek behind the curtain to see how that content actually ends up in our feeds.
Lucky for us, Meta has an explainer on how your Threads feed actually works. Spoiler alert: It requires tracking you and every other user across Meta apps, just to make the best guess as to whether you'll actually engage with that post at the top of your feed.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, your Threads feed is powered by AI. Its goal is to float content that it thinks you'll want to engage with to the top.
Meta explains that this AI program starts by gathering some of the public content posted on Threads, in addition to all of the content posted by accounts you actually follow. Once it rounds up this content, it analyzes the content, looking for trends based on content you've interacted with in the past. Last, the system ranks this content, putting the posts it thinks you'll most likely interact with first.
That's it in a nutshell, at least according to Meta. Of course, that seems mostly obvious, which is why learning how Meta's AI actually delivers content is more interesting. The company dives a bit deeper into the mechanisms behind the AI and how it makes its predictions for your feed:
Whether or not you'll like a post: The AI thinks about how many posts you've seen in your feed, how many you've liked, as well as how many times you've liked a particular account's posts.
How likely you are to follow this account: To predict this likelihood, Meta's AI looks at how many posts you've seen in your feed, when the last time you were active on Threads was, which accounts you recently followed, whether or not the post was predicted to violate Meta's Community Guidelines, as well as how many times you looked at that account on Instagram.
How likely you are to scroll past a post: To figure out whether you're more likely to engage with a post or simply scroll past, the AI looks at the amount of time you viewed a post, how many times you liked an account's post, and how many times the post was viewed by others. (That's right: It's not all about you.)
How likely you are to look at replies on a post: The AI wants to guess whether you'll look at the replies on a given post by checking how many times other users have looked at the replies on the post, how many replies you've personally seen, how many times you liked that account's posts, and how long it's been since the last time you used Threads.
How likely you are to visit the profile of the account that posted: The AI figures this one out by checking how many times the author's profile has been visited, the profile click rate on the account, whether or not the post was predicted to violate Community Guidelines, how many times you looked at the account on Instagram, and the number of times people looked at the account's profile.
In summary, you are always being tracked on not just Threads, but Instagram as well—not just you, but all Threads and Instagram users, too. The AI uses all this data to predict how you'll behave on Threads, and, depending on your actual activity, the cycle starts anew.
At the end of the day, your feed is what you make of it. Meta wants you to engage more on Threads, so it's going to try to serve you the content it thinks you'll engage with most. If you go out of your way to demonstrate which types of posts you actually want to see, the AI will start to correct for that. Meta outlines those steps you can take to actually have an impact on your feed, reducing the chances to see posts you're not interested in, and increasing the chances of seeing content you want.
Most things are obvious here: If you don't like an account's posts, unfollow or mute them. If you're particularly offended by the content, you can hide or report it. However, Meta encourages you to share posts you're interested in: By sharing a thread you like, you tell the algorithm to show you more like it. Not explicitly mentioned here is commenting: If you open the replies enough, Meta knows you're interested in the conversations of certain types of posts. If you engage in that conversation by commenting, all the better. Finally, if you're sick of seeing general posts from all over Threads, you can switch your feed to only show you content from accounts you actually follow. If you tap the Threads logo at the top, you can switch to Following instead of For you.
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