Its okay everybody, the CEO came out and said its *not* actually advertising but just simply an unsolicited, intrusive pop-up that tries to get users to use more of their services so its all good!
I think this only happens if you install the DDG extension. So it's not exactly unsolicited.
I totally get DDG wanting people to be aware of their services. I use their email proxy service and it seems like a solid addition to their portfolio. For me, anything that requires additional action or distraction when I'm just trying to do this one quick thing gets disabled / removed.
How often are people actually signing up for things? Maybe this could be a separate extension or at least have an easier way to mute the injected ad?
Has extension mentioned obnoxious inline ads as one of things it will be doing?
It's a bit weird to call intended functionality for sonething you install explicitly for that purpose an "ad". Let alone an "obnoxious" one.
I mean, how else would you expect "email protection in the browser" to work at an extension level, other than the extension trigerring a message with more information when you're about to type your email?
I think it would be reasonable to notify me about this new feature in a less disruptive way, like from the extension's existing information pane. Inserting that inline into the websites I use isn't the only way to notify me, but it does seem like the most obnoxious way to do that.
Wow. So disappointing.
Chrome's new Side Panel button is an ad for the side panel feature.
But to answer your question, a button in the UI is not considered an Ad when it's there to facilitate whatever the app is used for.
Seeing this notification appear once, in the extensions area as a popup from the DuckDuckGo extension, would feel much less outrageous. It does not feel like onboarding, it feels like an ad. It is an unexpected disruption of my browser's usual behavior.
I understand your concern though and again will take it to the team. Popping up a level, though, the goal of our product is to be the "easy button" for privacy, and email protection is a big part of it, since as we (and others) have gotten much better at web tracking protection (e.g., see https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/we...), unscrupulous actors have done more and more email tracking, using your email address as a unique identifier to track you across sites and putting email trackers within emails to do similar. So, when you sign up for forms online, to escape this tracking, you really should be using a per-site alias, as well as using a service that strips email trackers from emails so you aren't tracked on email open.
I've got no qualms with the product mission for the email tracking protection, I think it's a great one and I utilize email tracking protection myself. I made this post because I really like DuckDuckGo and I was just so astounded at this behavior. I tell everyone to "just use the duck website" because I really do believe in your mission, and I hope this post doesn't set off too much bandwagoning. My concern is voiced from a standpoint of support, not negativity. I really appreciate the opportunity to exchange this feedback with you directly and especially to add to this post that I really do generally love what you're building. When it doesn't get in my face when I'm trying to work.
I hope this post winds up being useful feedback. The decision to ship this into the product is mystifying to me. I would agree with the other users saying this should be recalled immediately while any internal discussion about it is ongoing.
Yegg discussed it the last time email protection came up on the front page - rolling it out internally into their android browser was the main goal, and the extension for others. The motivations are in the old hn posts. They could have rolled out a new app and extension, and maintained those on top of the current ones, but those would be extra codebases to maintain.
> the UX of this feature can be improved, and will take this feedback back to the team working on it.
It's adware, and you need to recall it.
DDG has always been a little sketchy, but now I know.
Messing with the integrity of a web page's content without your users' consent is a gross violation of trust. Doing it inside of a browser extension is adware. Doing it as a privacy-focused company is... a fast way to destroy your image as a privacy-focused company.
If you're manipulating the display of a page that I'm visiting, without an opt-in, and you're being shady about calling it advertising, why should I expect that you're going to treat email with the level of integrity required/expected?
This is a hard red line that you've crossed, especially as a privacy-focused company, and instead of backing down, you're blaming your UI design? Stop. There is no amount of UI work that makes it OK to silently insert your ad into someone else's content.
If you want to cross-promote (please don't, but if you must), you need to do it in a way that makes it clear it's coming from the extension, and not manipulating third-party content without user consent. The second you start inserting your message into a page that I'm reading, is the second that I uninstall your extension and never use it again.
Which is a shame. I like your search product, and I thought that I liked your company's philosophy and goals. Oh well.
If the feature is the point of the extension you’re installing, maybe don’t install the extension.
And for what it's worth, I use a password manager and have used a few over the years, and I've never encountered such an obnoxious UI from one.
For myself, the pictures from OP looked much more like an onboarding tutorial for the extension's features than they did an ad, and I suspect that's how most people would react.
You have a brand that requires trust. You've built up that trust slowly, and it could be destroyed so easily. To me this injection crosses a line of interfering with content that isn't yours. You are trusted to have access to this content, not to change/add to it. I get that it's not quite the same as 3rd party ads, etc. But it's an untrustworthy thing to have done.
As a happy long time user I'm currently still willing to give some benefit of the doubt about this being a misstep, and I'm hoping to see it corrected shortly.
But I think the value of the trust you've built up shouldn't be understated. It won't take many scandals like this and once the trust fades you'll never get it back. The bigger issue to address is not just how to fix this, but also how to fix the broken decision making process that allowed this to happen at all.
Someone else has said about having a core set of values against which everything is reviewed. How about an ethics committee of sorts to uphold those values. A group of beta tester users who don't just test things work, but also give feedback on whether new changes are aligned with your brand and core user base. (Email is in my profile if you want to discuss this idea, if be interested in helping)
Sincere question from someone who doesn't understand why we're freaking out: Why is this different to you than a password manager doing the exact same thing with password fields?
Here's what I see: someone installed the DuckDuckGo extension, which now has a new feature. That feature is best implemented by having a little widget that allows creating a new alias. Users who haven't seen the widget before wouldn't know how to use it, so DuckDuckGo added an explanation for people who click on it without having set it up yet.
Where was the line crossed? Do you object to having a widget at all? Is the problem having an inline explanation introducing the feature? Is it the phrasing of the pop-up?
I see a lot of visceral reactions and condemnations, but I don't see anyone explaining what makes this an ad and not onboarding.
If I installed a browser extension to remove trackers from sites, I'd be surprised to find it adding in email onboarding buttons to every email entry form.
It may not be clear, but the email privacy thing is a new feature. I just checked back on the chrome store and it does now make it reasonably clear that it's part of the extension now. Fair enough. But for those who had installed before, this would have come as a surprise when it suddenly started happening. The change of purpose is surprising. This reduces trust for a brand who's entire reason to exist is built on trust from a user base who are more than the average amount of paranoid.
If I installed a speech synthesis extension who's purpose was to read out the content of a web page, I would be equally annoyed if it after an update it started verbalising extra words trying to encourage me to try out their braille books everytime I browsed Amazon. Braille books might be just what the average user of a speech extension might want. But it's still a breach of trust to start modifying other websites content for a reason you weren't explicitly given permission for.
Money is a helluva drug.
How do you differentiate which form fields you should offer your services on?
> This title implies we are injecting third-party advertising into web forms
You're literally injecting ads for your own products into web forms.
You could argue that people might think that "injecting ads" means "injecting 3rd party ads", and that wouldn't (currently) be true. But if you're not allowed to say that you are injecting ads, when you are injecting ads, that's super gray zone: Don't say we're doing X (we're doing X) because it makes us sound like we're doing X+1!
I switched from DuckDuckGo to https://searx.be/ during the outbreak of the Ukrainian war because DuckDuckGo started censoring Russian sites [1].
Email proxies may be seen as a privacy protection, but it comes with a vendor lock-in: You cannot reset the password for that service without DuckDuckGo now. So those ads have commercial value to DuckDuckGo, you're no goodie two-shoes here.
[1]: https://www.vox.com/recode/22981115/duckduckgo-free-speech-p...
This is part of the onboarding for our optional DuckDuckGo Email Protection feature, where we generate email aliases for you on sign up forms (so you don't give out your real email address), which then forwards to your regular inbox with email trackers removed in the process: https://spreadprivacy.com/protect-your-inbox-with-duckduckgo.... It is mentioned in the add-on description as one of the extension's primary features, e.g., at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-fo...
Update: I am listening to the feedback presented here. There is a whole team of people working on this feature, trying to bring needed email protection to our mainstream user base. Email protection as a concept is hard for people to understand and the team feels that this in-context onboarding was the best way to explain it. However, we will now revisit this given the feedback.
(Also x-posting part of another comment for context on this feature: Popping up a level, the goal of our product is to be the "easy button" for privacy, and email protection is a big part of it, since as we (and others) have gotten much better at web tracking protection (e.g., see https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/we...), unscrupulous actors have done more and more email tracking, using your email address as a unique identifier to track you across sites and putting email trackers within emails to do similar.)