Duck Tales: How DuckDuckGo makes the sites you visit less annoying and more private (Episode 11)

3 Dec 2025 · 15 min

Episode Duck Tales: How DuckDuckGo makes the sites you visit less annoying and more private (Episode 11)

0:00 14:45

In this episode, Beah (Product) and Max (Frontend) discuss cookie pop-up protection, why our solution is uniquely private, and the feedback loops we use to help us reject cookies across more of the sites you visit.

Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.

Beah: Hello and welcome to DuckTales where we go behind the scenes with DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from employees ⁓ about our vision, product updates and our approach to AI or how we operate as a company. In this case, today we’re going to be talking about a feature that I dearly love.

⁓ cookie pop-up protection with ⁓ Max here. So let me just do some quick introductions, I guess, before I’m kind of getting a little ahead of myself. I’m Bea Berger-Lenahan. I lead the product team here at Tech Tech Go. And I’m going to be asking Max a few questions. Max, would you like to introduce yourself?

Max: Yeah, sure. Hey, ⁓ my name is Max. I am an engineer in the front-end team at DuckDuckGo. Been here for about three years, a little more. Yeah, I’m excited to talk about cookie pop-up protection.

Beah: Awesome. Thank you, Max. We’re glad you’re here. I’m glad you’re here. ⁓ So first, just tell me, tell all of us a little bit about what cookie pop-up protection is, how it works.

Max: Yeah, so this is the ⁓ feature in our browsers that handles cookie pop-up for you. ⁓ And in a nutshell, it... ⁓ that’s a good question. ⁓ I mean, I think most people have seen a cookie pop-up, but yeah, the definitions vary, but we’re talking about these...

Beah: What’s a cookie pop-up first? Hahaha

Max: dialogues that websites show you on the first visit that typically tell you something about their data sharing practices and the use of cookies and similar technologies. And sometimes they give you a way to opt out of some optional tracking ⁓ or cookies. And that’s what we’re actually doing. We’re automating, ⁓ basically clicking reject buttons for you or whatever it takes to...toggle all these little checkboxes and saving the settings. ⁓ I could demo it if that’s okay. ⁓ So let me share my screen. ⁓

Beah: That’d be great.

Max: So for the sake of the demo, I’ve disabled the feature in the settings right now. It’s enabled by default, ⁓ but I’m just going to show you. ⁓ So if we go to Sky Scanner, for example, and I’m in the Netherlands, so you see a Dutch version, but there is this huge cookie pop-up ⁓ when you load the page. And if I enable the feature, cookie pop-up protection and reload the page, you’re not gonna see this pop up anymore. And what happened, and then there will be a ⁓ little notification in the address bar. And if you drill down, you’ll see the explanation

Beah: Okay. Okay.

Max: what happened. But basically what happened behind the scenes is we clicked on the reject button rejecting the cookies automatically. And that’s why we call it cookie pop-up protection. ⁓ So for us, this is a privacy protection feature because it actually ⁓ chooses the most private option for you, which is not always easy. Let’s see.

Beah: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if we have data on this, but I imagine very few people are willing to go into, you know, click the option to actually adjust ⁓ settings and start toggling things on and off on the regular.

Max: Yeah, ⁓ that’s for sure. So ⁓ some pop-ups can be really tricky to opt out. ⁓ You would need to go to click, Settings and then toggle a bunch of check boxes and then click Save. This can become... Like most people, think they just click Accept button. ⁓ And ⁓ yeah, this is of course not good for your privacy. ⁓ So we help...

Beah: Yeah.

Max: getting through these dark patterns.

Beah: Yeah, makes sense. why did we build this? What’s the origin story?

Max: Yeah, so ⁓…

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