DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused consumer technology company, on Thursday launched a new Privacy Pro subscription that bundles VPN services, personal information deletion, and identity theft recovery.
This plan costs $9.99 per month or $99 per year and is currently only available to people in the United States. This is the company's first move toward a subscription service built into the DuckDuckGo browser.
DuckDuckGo has been profitable since 2014, but previously relied on advertising revenue. Subscription services open up new revenue avenues for businesses.
Image credit: DuckDuckGo
A VPN uses the open source WireGuard protocol to protect your personal information as you visit different sites on the web. The company says all DNS queries are also routed through DuckDuckGo's own DNS resolver, so your internet service provider (ISP) can't snoop on your browsing history.
DuckDuckGo uses its identity removal service to scan dozens of data broker sites for details like names and addresses. If this service finds your details on any of these sites, we will request their removal and will also process your email correspondence with those sites.
Image credit: DuckDuckGo
The company says the feature is built on technology from Removaly, a startup that DuckDuckGo acquired in 2022. (At the time, Removaly founder Kyle Krzeski said: Posted in X (The privacy company acquired the startup without disclosing its name).
The third feature of DuckDuckGo's Privacy Pro plan is identity theft recovery. Advisors are available 24 hours a day to help her recover personal information-related losses. This includes financial losses, credit report correction by freezing your credit report until your identity is restored, and replacement and cancellation of items such as driver's licenses, bank cards, and passports. The company said a collection agent will work with you, handle all formalities and follow up with various companies.
Image credit: DuckDuckGo
To ensure your privacy, DuckDuckGo keeps no logs of your VPN activity, stores data provided during personal information removal on your local device, and does not store any data you provide while deleting your personal information until you sign in to the Privacy Pro service. It states that a random ID will be assigned when uploading.
Earlier this year, DuckDuckGo added cross-device sync for passwords and bookmarks to make this information easily accessible.
Earlier this year, court filings in U.S. Department of Justice v. Google revealed that DuckDuckGo accounted for just 2.5% of general search queries in the U.S. in 2021, and 0.5% to 2.5% in Europe in 2023. Became.