Introducing DuckDuckGo Tracker Radar to Blokada

Press Blog
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After many requests from our users, the new and noteworthy Tracker Radar by DuckDuckGo is now available in Blokada!

Credits: the Tracker Radar database is licensed by DuckDuckGo under the CCBY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

Learn more about the available blocklists here.

How to use it?

Please note, despite the best effort to avoid any incompatibilities, this is an early preview, and it may break some of sites you visit, or apps you use.

In order to activate it on Android (Blokada 5):

  • Open “Advanced” tab
  • Tap “Blocklists”
  • Find “Duck Duck Go” at the bottom, and activate it

In order to activate it on Android (Blokada 4):

  • Go to bottom menu -> adblocking -> host lists,
  • Activate the list,
  • It may take some time before the new list reaches your device. To speed it up, go to bottom menu -> adblocking -> adblocking settings, and tap Sync in list download settings.

In order to activate it on iOS:

  • Update to Blokada 5.0.4 or newer,
  • Go to Advanced tab, then tap All,
  • Find the feature on the list and activate it.

How is it made?

Considering the data model of the Tracker Radar, generating a verbatim list of hosts would not work well and cause many issues for host list based content blockers, like Blokada.

Instead, we have developed a script that generates the blocklist in a bit different way. First of all, it will generate hosts with subdomains (and not top level domains), and will not include entries for very common subdomains, like www or api, that could easily break things. Second, it will only include entries for domains, for which the Tracker Radar detected enough of tracking resources for that subdomain. This, again, helps to eliminate entries that could break things. And finally, some categories, like CDN or Online Payment, are also ignored and not included in the list.

With this approach, we decided to err on the side of caution. Currently, the final list includes over 3k hosts, which seem to nicely compliment the more common blocklists.

We will adapt the script based on your feedback, so feel free to comment on this article!

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Wow, that is really awesome:D!
It sounds like you put a lot of work into that, thank you very much:)!! I directly enabled it.

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Thanks for the great work!

If anyone is facing problems with the images in wikipedia and the enabled DDG Tracker Radar List at the moment you’ll need to allow the domain upload.wikimedia.org.

It could also be interesting for you to have a look at the following issue:

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Awesome feedback. I just updated the script to fix this:

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This lists blocks store.steampowered.com and thus breaks the Steam App

Somehow allowing the domain withing Blokada doesn’t help, it still gets blocked. Only deactivating Blokada helps.

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Added to whitelist, this host won’t be included in the next update of ddg list (today).

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FYI, images for all items listed on eBay started getting blocked. I think it’s the latest DuckDuckGo Tracker Radar host list. The list dated Feb 26, 2021, has I.ebayimg.com in two spots. When I turn that list off, I get the eBay pictures back in both Android eBay app and browser.

Screenshot_20210228-010019_Chrome
Screenshot_20210228-010019_Chrome1080×2032 293 KB

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Thanks for this report. I have just now whitelisted this domain.

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That did the trick to make eBay usable again. Thanks!

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They are also blocking the following 2 domains which breaks the Steam store app

store.cloudflare.steamstatic.com
cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com
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Can you please whitelist

images.ebaycdn.net

This is also an Ebay Content Delivery Network image domain. It is a CNAME domain for i.ebayimg.com
Because I use Deep Packet Inspection it blocks CNames too

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Whitelisted those hosts, thank you.

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community.cloudflare.steamstatic.com is breaking the Steam gaming store on the mobile app
Thanks

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a.kickstarter.com prevents Kickstarter links from opening in the Kickstarter app

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Updated, thanks.

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50992.edgekey.net is a CNAME for www.washingtonpost.com
I believe this to be a nonmalicious domain

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menu-static.gog-statics.com is the static images for the menu of GOG.com
This breaks gog.com when browsing from a mobile device.

login.msa.msidentity.com is a microsoft login website used for authentication purposes and is blocked by this list

Also I seem to be limited to only 6 posts so I will move future whitelisting requests to your GitHub.

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All added. Ok either way works.

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@Karol, two items:

  1. This lists prevents me from logging into indeed.com. We need to allowlist newassets.hcaptcha.com^. Also need to allow jsv3.recruitics.com^ as I can’t navigate to a job site without this list blocking the page load. Here’s a link to a sample job if you wan to try to replicate my issues.

  2. How often are we updating this list from the Duckduckgo Tracker Radar and filtering it through our allowlist? For instance, this project uses DuckDuckGo’s Tracker Radar and their blocklist is updated on the first day of the month. However, unlike ours, their list contains all the links that Tracker Radar detected to have browser fingerprinting; there is no further processing to remove false positive.