DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro review: A simple, but effective privacy bundle

Unlike rivals such as Google and Microsoft’s Bing search engine, DuckDuckGo unquestionably puts privacy first. Its popular search engine is based on user privacy, forgoing ad-trackers and never logging search history.

Recently, DuckDuckGo released an additional service called PrivacyPro to add to its growing collection of privacy-focused features. Consisting of a VPN, personal information removal tool, and identity theft restoration service, PrivacyPro hopes to offer a comprehensive set of privacy protections in one convenient bundle.

Is the PrivacyPro subscription bundle worth it? I took the new service for a spin to find out.

DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro in brief:

• Device connections: 5 simultaneous connections
• Business location: Pennsylvania, USA
• Number of servers: 13
• Number of country locations: 7
• Cost: About $9.99 per month, or $100 for one year

Further reading: See our roundup of the best VPNs to learn about competing products.

What are DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro’s features & services?

DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro offers three services in one: a browser-based VPN, personal-data removal tool, and identity-theft restoration service. For the purposes of this review, I’ll mainly be focusing on the VPN and personal-data removal service. 

Fortunately I was not a victim of identity theft while testing this service so I can’t personally speak to the effectiveness of the identity-theft restoration service. However, for this service DuckDuckGo has partnered with Iris — a leading identity-theft protection company. It offers 24/7 advisor support assistance. 

For what it’s worth, the advisors promise to repair your credit after fraudulent activity, replace important documents, fix fraudulent medical claims, provide some travel assistance if you’re out of the country, and cover certain out-of-pocket expenses. Hopefully you never have to use it, but the service is included should you need it.

As for the VPN, compared to other standalone services such as ExpressVPN or NordVPN, it’s pretty spartan. Part of this can be attributed to the newness of the service, and part to the fact that it’s only browser-based and not a standalone application — it’s only available with the DuckDuckGo browser.

When you open up a new DuckDuckGo browser, you’ll see a globe icon with a lock in the upper right-hand corner — this is the VPN. If the lock is unlocked it means you’re not currently connected and it locks itself when you connect.

Sam Singleton

Sam Singleton

            <div class="scrim" style="background-color: #fff" aria-hidden="true"></div>
    </div></figure><p class="imageCredit">Sam Singleton</p></div>

Clicking on this icon opens up a very small pop-out window with a toggle to connect to the VPN. If you turn on the toggle, it will automatically connect to the nearest available server.

Once connected, this window will display the connection time of your current connection, the location of the server you’re connected to, and the server’s IP address. You can either click on the location here or navigate to VPN Settings at the bottom of the window to change the server location.

Sam Singleton

            <div class="lightbox-image-container foundry-lightbox"><div class="extendedBlock-wrapper block-coreImage undefined"><figure class="wp-block-image size-full enlarged-image"><img decoding="async" data-wp-bind--src="selectors.core.image.enlargedImgSrc" data-wp-style--object-fit="selectors.core.image.lightboxObjectFit" src="" alt="DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro VPN" class="wp-image-2333444" width="604" height="628" loading="lazy" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption"><p>DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro VPN&rsquo;s server list provides seven countries to choose from.</p>

Sam Singleton

    </div></figure><p class="imageCredit">Sam Singleton</p></div>

DuckDuckGo’s VPN currently offers 13 servers spread across seven countries, with the majority — seven — located in the U.S. Other country locations include Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK.

There are no real settings to speak of with the VPN. It’s not advertised, but the VPN comes with a built-in kill-switch feature, which worked well in my testing, blocking traffic when I manually forced a disconnection.

While not offered to Windows users, there is an additional split-tunneling feature available for Android. This allows you to pick and choose which apps run through the VPN and is a great way to optimize privacy for apps that need it while keeping others, such as games, from having their speed throttled by a VPN.

That’s about all there is to the VPN. There are no options for multi-hop, no fancy obfuscated servers, nor Onion-over-VPN connections — all things you’re apt to see with privacy-focused VPNs. I’ll try not to judge too harshly here as DuckDuckGo just released this VPN and to their credit, they are up-front about the improvements they hope to make in the future.

How is DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro’s Information Removal tool?