DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro review: A simple, but effective privacy bundle

Price When Reviewed

$9.99

Best Prices Today: DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro

Unlike rivals reminiscent of Google and Microsoft’s Bing search engine, DuckDuckGo unquestionably places privateness first. Its fashionable search engine is predicated on consumer privateness, forgoing ad-trackers and by no means logging search historical past.

Recently, DuckDuckGo launched a further service referred to as PrivacyPro so as to add to its rising assortment of privacy-focused options. Consisting of a VPN, private data elimination instrument, and identification theft restoration service, PrivacyPro hopes to supply a complete set of privateness protections in a single handy bundle.

Is the PrivacyPro subscription bundle price it? I took the brand new service for a spin to search out out.

DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro in short:

• Device connections: 5 simultaneous connections
• Business location: Pennsylvania, USA
• Number of servers: 13
• Number of nation places: 7
• Cost: About $9.99 per thirty days, or $100 for one 12 months

Further studying: See our roundup of the best VPNs to find out about competing merchandise.

What are DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro’s options & providers?

DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro affords three providers in a single: a browser-based VPN, personal-data elimination instrument, and identity-theft restoration service. For the needs of this evaluation, I’ll primarily be specializing in the VPN and personal-data elimination service. 

Fortunately I used to be not a sufferer of identification theft whereas testing this service so I can’t personally communicate to the effectiveness of the identity-theft restoration service. However, for this service DuckDuckGo has partnered with Iris — a number one identity-theft safety firm. It affords 24/7 advisor assist help. 

For what it’s price, the advisors promise to restore your credit score after fraudulent exercise, change necessary paperwork, repair fraudulent medical claims, present some journey help when you’re overseas, and canopy sure out-of-pocket bills. Hopefully you by no means have to make use of it, however the service is included must you want it.

As for the VPN, in comparison with different standalone providers reminiscent of ExpressVPN or NordVPN, it’s fairly spartan. Part of this may be attributed to the novelty of the service, and half to the truth that it’s solely browser-based and never a standalone utility — it’s solely accessible with the DuckDuckGo browser.

When you open up a brand new DuckDuckGo browser, you’ll see a globe icon with a lock within the higher right-hand nook — that is the VPN. If the lock is unlocked it means you’re not presently linked and it locks itself while you join.

Sam Singleton

Sam Singleton

Sam Singleton

Clicking on this icon opens up a really small pop-out window with a toggle to hook up with the VPN. If you activate the toggle, it would mechanically hook up with the closest accessible server.

Once linked, this window will show the connection time of your present connection, the placement of the server you’re linked to, and the server’s IP handle. You can both click on on the placement right here or navigate to VPN Settings on the backside of the window to alter the server location.

Sam Singleton

Sam Singleton

Sam Singleton

DuckDuckGo’s VPN presently affords 13 servers unfold throughout seven nations, with the bulk — seven — situated within the U.S. Other nation places embody Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK.

There are not any actual settings to talk of with the VPN. It’s not marketed, however the VPN comes with a built-in kill-switch characteristic, which labored properly in my testing, blocking site visitors once I manually compelled a disconnection.

While not provided to Windows customers, there’s a further split-tunneling characteristic accessible for Android. This lets you choose and select which apps run by means of the VPN and is a good way to optimize privateness for apps that want it whereas holding others, reminiscent of video games, from having their velocity throttled by a VPN.

That’s about all there’s to the VPN. There are not any choices for multi-hop, no fancy obfuscated servers, nor Onion-over-VPN connections — all stuff you’re apt to see with privacy-focused VPNs. I’ll strive to not decide too harshly right here as DuckDuckGo simply launched this VPN and to their credit score, they’re up-front concerning the enhancements they hope to make sooner or later.

Sam Singleton

Sam Singleton

Sam Singleton

DuckDuckGo acquired Removaly in 2022 to assist them construct their very own in-house knowledge elimination service. It primarily scrapes a bunch of information dealer web sites to your private data after which when discovered, sends requests to those websites to take away your data. 

Even after the preliminary scan, the service will frequently carry out this operate every now and then to ensure no new data have been added.

The service is extraordinarily easy. You initially inform DuckDuckGo your private data reminiscent of names, pseudonyms and aliases, addresses, and 12 months of start. The service then shortly will get to work scanning web sites — 53 websites in my case.

As it finds data of your private knowledge, it lists them so you may see what knowledge every dealer web site has. After the scan, DuckDuckGo will ship data-removal requests to all the recognized websites.

Sam Singleton

Sam Singleton

Sam Singleton

You can hold tabs on the progress of any ongoing removals within the private dashboard inside the DuckDuckGo browser. They warn you that knowledge removals can take “around 2-3 weeks to complete,” however I discovered nearly all of mine had been eliminated inside the first week of testing.

These varieties of knowledge elimination providers are popping up far and wide lately, with Surfshark’s Incogni and Mozilla’s Monitor Plus being a pair that come to thoughts. 

Data brokers are nonetheless a moderately unknown, however shady business that makes tons of cash off freely promoting non-public consumer knowledge on-line. Not solely is it good to see DuckDuckGo providing one of these elimination service, however together with it in an inexpensive bundle deal makes it much more interesting.

How a lot does DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro price?

The complete DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro bundle is obtainable both by means of a month-to-month subscription or a longer-term yearly subscription service.

The month-to-month subscription is $9.99 per thirty days, and the yearly subscription is a one-time cost of $99.99.

If it was simply the VPN we had been speaking about, I’d say that the service isn’t price it. The VPN continues to be an excessive amount of in its infancy to justify outlaying that form of cash when you might get a lot extra with different VPNs. 

However, the inclusion of the data-removal service and identity-theft restoration make this well worth the worth. Individual subscriptions elsewhere can set you again the identical worth for every of those providers — which means you’d possible pay two or thrice the value of PrivacyPro for a similar options from a competitor.

How is DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro’s VPN efficiency?

When testing a VPN’s efficiency I sometimes measure connection speeds throughout its servers in six completely different nations world wide after which examine them to my baseline web velocity. Since DuckDuckGo’s VPN has so few servers, I simply determined to check them in each nation provided to get a median.

During the assessments, DuckDuckGo’s VPN was in a position to handle 34 % of the bottom obtain velocity and a moderately pedestrian 25 % of the bottom add velocity. Those numbers aren’t horrible, however they put it properly off the tempo of the fastest VPNs I’ve examined.

Accessing geo-restricted streaming content material is one other essential characteristic that you simply need to have with a VPN. So how does DuckDuckGo’s VPN work with notoriously powerful providers reminiscent of Netflix? Good, however not nice. Most of the servers I examined had been in a position to entry Netflix efficiently. Unfortunately, entry with U.S. servers was a hit-or-miss and generally I bumped into velocity points.

Overall although, I’d say DuckDuckGo is a good alternative of VPN to unblock Netflix and different streaming providers. The caveat being that you simply may want to check a couple of completely different servers within the U.S. earlier than you discover one which works.

How is DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro’s VPN safety & privateness?

Sam Singleton

Sam Singleton

Sam Singleton

The DuckDuckGo VPN solely affords the WireGuard protocol presently. I don’t actually have a problem with this although. WireGuard is without doubt one of the quickest and most safe VPN protocols and it’s open supply, which means it’s dependable and reliable.

DuckDuckGo states, “We don’t keep logs of your VPN activity. We have no way to tie what you do while connected to the DuckDuckGo VPN to you as an individual. For example, we don’t have any record of website visits, DNS requests, IP addresses connected, or session lengths.”

It does hold nameless efficiency metrics reminiscent of CPU load and errors, however they guarantee you that nothing is linked to a person consumer.

The firm solely makes use of devoted VPN servers, which means they aren’t shared with anybody else. The servers are rented from internet hosting suppliers and DuckDuckGo makes certain to level out they’re saved separate from the servers used for search infrastructure.

The VPN presently has not undergone any unbiased audits to confirm these no-logs claims, however that’s to be anticipated because the service is so new. Still, it’s one thing that I consider is essential to solidify consumer belief in a VPN supplier and I hope it’s carried out within the close to future.

DuckDuckGo is headquartered in Pennsylvania, U.S.A., which signifies that it falls inside the jurisdiction of the Five Eyes knowledge sharing alliance. It’s in all probability unlikely to matter a lot to the common consumer, however privacy-conscious customers ought to take this into consideration earlier than subscribing to its PrivacyPro service.

Is DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro price it?

DuckDuckGo’s PrivacyPro supplies a fundamental, however dependable VPN, a useful data-removal service, and a life-saving-if-you-need-it identity-theft restoration service. Whether or not you suppose the subscription price is price it would rely nearly totally on in case you are a DuckDuckGo browser devotee or not. 

The VPN is nice, however as a standalone service it isn’t strong sufficient to justify the expense. However, its simple integration into the DuckDuckGo atmosphere and the addition of the opposite two providers make this a handy alternative for these already utilizing the browser. If you like a unique browser, or simply can’t be bothered to modify, then you definitely’re finest sticking with one other, extra highly effective VPN.

Editor’s observe: Because on-line providers are sometimes iterative, gaining new options and efficiency enhancements over time, this evaluation is topic to alter to be able to precisely replicate the present state of the service. Any modifications to textual content or our closing evaluation verdict might be famous on the high of this text.