DuckDuckGo, privacy-focused consumer technology company thrown out a new Privacy Pro subscription on Thursday that includes a VPN service, personal information deletion and identity theft restoration.
The plan, which costs $9.99 per month or $99 per year, is currently available only to people in the U.S. This is the company's first step toward a subscription service built into the DuckDuckGo browser.
DuckDuckGo has been profitable since 2014, but until now it has relied on advertising revenue. The subscription service opens a new avenue for the company to make money.
Image credits: Duck Duck to win
The VPN uses the open source WireGuard protocol to protect your identity while visiting different sites on the web. The company said that all DNS queries are also routed through DuckDuckGo's own DNS resolvers, so Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can't spy on your browsing history.
With the personal information removal service, DuckDuckGo scans dozens of data broker sites to find details such as your name and address. If the service finds your data on any of these sites, it requests its deletion and also handles email correspondence with them.
The company says that for this feature it uses Removaly, a startup that DuckDuckGo acquired in 2022. (At the time, Removaly founder Kyle Krzeski twitter.com/FounderKyle/status/1593359356707459077?lang=en” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>published in x that a privacy company acquired the startup without naming it).
The third feature of DuckDuckGo's privacy professional plan is identity theft restoration, where an advisor will help you recover your identity-related loss 24 hours a day. This includes financial losses, fixing credit reports and even freezing them until identity is restored, and replacing and canceling items such as driver's licenses, bank cards, and passports. The company said the recovery agent will work with you, handle all the paperwork and follow up with multiple companies.
Image credits: Duck Duck to win
DuckDuckGo says that to ensure user privacy, it does not keep logs of users' VPN activity, stores data provided during deletion of personal information on the local device, and the company assigns a random ID when users sign up for the service. Privacy Pro.'
Earlier this year, DuckDuckGo added cross-device sync for passwords and bookmarks for easy access to this information.
Earlier this year, court documents in the US Department of Justice v. Google revealed that DuckDuckGo accounted for just 2.5% of overall search queries in the US in 2021 and between 0.5%. and 2.5% in Europe in 2023.
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