Google’s AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) technology, designed to speed up the loading of web pages, especially on mobile phones, has found itself in the last few hours with two irreconcilable enemies, who will try to combat it in their respective services to protect the users.
Both DuckDuckGo and Brave point out that this technology is a threat to privacy because it represents an element of Google’s control over usersas understood from their respective publications, so both platforms will take users to the original versions of the websites instead of the generated AMP versions in case they are activated in them.
Seeking to control users from possible monitoring of their activity
In the case of DuckDuckGo, a posted tweet hours ago indicated that in case of loading or sharing a page with AMP, either from the DuckDuckGo applications for Android, iOS or Mac, or from the extension for Firefox or Chrome, the publisher’s web page will be used instead of the version AMP.
From Brave, developers of the privacy-focused web browser of the same name, they point out that from their own browser they will soon take users to the publisher’s original website instead of the AMP version that was available through the new function in which is working and will be called De-AMP.
For brave:
AMP harms users’ privacy, security, and internet experience, and just as bad, AMP helps Google further monopolize and control the web address
These initiatives have been made public almost at the same time, and additionally add to existing anti-AMP extensions for major web browsers.
The main privacy concern is that AMP versions generated for publisher websites are served directly from Google servers using technology controlled by themwith the consequences that this may have on the control and monitoring of user activity.
We do not know if new initiatives from third parties will arrive along the way, but it is striking that AMP technology has had some enemies, to the point of trying to circumvent these versions to bring users to the original versions.
Perhaps the fact that mobile data connections have been improved and mobile devices are increasingly powerful may indicate that AMP technology may become obsolete or simply expendable in the new connectivity scenario, despite the fact that Google is already working in an improved version of AMP, where the AMP versions will also be served from the company’s own servers.
