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It's so strange people are calling this advertising. It's functionality of a web browser plugin that you have to install. It literally one of the features on th

It's so strange people are calling this advertising. It's functionality of a web browser plugin that you have to install. It literally one of the features on the extension's description page. "Enable Built-in Email Protection — Over 85% of emails sent to Duck Addresses contained trackers that can detect when you’ve opened a message, where you were when you opened it, and what device you were using. Email Protection makes it easy to block most email trackers and hide your existing address when signing up for things online, all without switching email providers."

freedomben 4y ago
> It literally one of the features on the extension's description page. Yes, but just one of the features, and not one I've been using because I wasn't interested in it at the time. This is a classic "advertising" opportunity that companies do all the time called "upselling," and it's absolutely an ad because the whole point is to get me to start using a feature that I'm not currently using. I think many of the responses here have been overreactions, and "advertising" is definitely a dirty word on HN and gets some severe and undeserved knee-jerk reactions, but it is what it is.
mustacheemperor 4y ago
This is at least the third similar reply I've read in this thread, so I'll just reiterate that this extension is much older than this feature, and at the time I installed this extension nothing about its description indicated it would ever behave like this. When I installed this, it was offered essentially as a PrivacyBadger alternative. The only notification to me that it was being changed to new kind of extension offering more services was the injection of an advertisement for those services into the form fields of webpages I visit. The existing extension already has a UI panel - it lives in the top right of my browser, under an icon. Plenty of other extensions have utilized this panel or a new tab page to respectfully inform me of changes to the offering. DuckDuckGo is the only extension that has decided to materially alter the contents of the webpages I visit without my consent to make such a notification.

freedomben 4y ago

> It literally one of the features on the extension's description page. Yes, but just one of the features, and not one I've been using because I wasn't interested in it at the time. This is a classic "advertising" opportunity that companies do all the time called "upselling," and it's absolutely an ad because the whole point is to get me to start using a feature that I'm not currently using. I think many of the responses here have been overreactions, and "advertising" is definitely a dirty word on HN and gets some severe and undeserved knee-jerk reactions, but it is what it is.

mustacheemperor 4y ago

This is at least the third similar reply I've read in this thread, so I'll just reiterate that this extension is much older than this feature, and at the time I installed this extension nothing about its description indicated it would ever behave like this. When I installed this, it was offered essentially as a PrivacyBadger alternative. The only notification to me that it was being changed to new kind of extension offering more services was the injection of an advertisement for those services into the form fields of webpages I visit. The existing extension already has a UI panel - it lives in the top right of my browser, under an icon. Plenty of other extensions have utilized this panel or a new tab page to respectfully inform me of changes to the offering. DuckDuckGo is the only extension that has decided to materially alter the contents of the webpages I visit without my consent to make such a notification.