Duck Tales: DuckDuckGo will find and remove your personal information — like your name and email — from sites that store and sell it (Ep.44)

In this episode, Konrad (Engineering) and Shilpa (Engineering) discuss Personal Information Removal: what is a data broker, how we remove your records without ever sending your data to our servers, and the ‘whack-a-mole’ of constantly changing data broker sites.

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Konrad: Hello everyone and welcome to Duck Tales. We will look under the hood of DuckDuckGo, talk about stories, technology, and people who are building the privacy tools that you all use. And in each of the episodes, you’ll hear from different employees about our vision, updates to our products, how we do engineering, or how we approach AI. So today I’m your host. My name is Konrad Zwinell. And I’m working at DuckDuckGo for seven years now. I work on the front end team at the very beginning. Then I run privacy engineering team. And now I’m back on the front end team working with Shilpa, who is my guest today. And Shilpa is running a personal information removal tool team. And she will tell us more about it today. Shilpa, why don’t you introduce yourself?

Shilpa: Yeah, hi. I’m Shilpa. I have been in DuckDuckGo for, I think, a year and a half now. I joined in on the Apple team working on iOS and macOS. And for the last few months, I’ve been driving the team that does works on the personal information and mobile product.

Konrad: Nice. OK, so first question that people may have after hearing this intro is, what exactly is personal information removal? Could you tell us, high level Shilpa, what’s the product and what it does? What’s the idea behind it?

Shilpa: Yeah, so in the US, this is predominantly a US-based product. In the US, there’s entities called data brokers that basically harvest your personal information from various different sources, your online activity, social media, what have you. And they collect that information, and they basically buy and sell it as a commodity for advertisers and different entities. And our product basically goes and looks at all of these data brokers, looks for your personal information. If it’s there, then it submits a request to remove it. And if the data broker is complying, they will go ahead and remove it and we will be able to verify the removals for you as well.

Konrad: Nice. So basically reducing your footprint on the web, reducing availability to your personal information, such as address, phone number in some cases, relatives, if I remember correctly.

Shilpa: Yeah.

Konrad: So they collect quite a bit of information about you and make it really easy for advertisers, but also other people to look it up. For FV,

Shilpa: Yeah.