What does the ‘allow traffic to bypass the VPN’ setting do?

As explained in Personal Information Removal Privacy, DuckDuckGo submits removal requests to data broker sites on your behalf directly from your device. These data broker sites may try to block these automated removal requests if they appear to be coming from a VPN.

By allowing Personal Information Removal traffic to bypass the DuckDuckGo VPN, you can ensure that more of your records get removed while still enjoying VPN protection across the rest of your device. In addition, Personal Information Removal traffic is isolated from other browser activity on your computer, and no data from that traffic will persist on your device after the scan is complete.

Is Personal Information Removal traffic still hidden from my ISP if it bypasses the VPN?

Yes. When the VPN is on, automated scans and removal requests from Personal Information Removal are still hidden from your Internet service provider even when “allow traffic to bypass the VPN” is on. That’s because we still route DNS queries for data broker sites through the VPN, sending them through our own DNS resolver instead of your ISP, which adds an additional privacy layer to the VPN.

I have a question not covered here, how can I get help?

Please contact support at our Subscriber Support page. We use Zendesk, a third-party customer support platform, to store and facilitate our responses to support requests.

If you have ideas on how to improve the subscription, please let us know using the “Share Feedback” button in the DuckDuckGo browser.