Search engine DuckDuckGo would withdraw VPN from Canada if lawful-access bill passes
DuckDuckGo has announced it will withdraw its VPN service from Canada if the proposed lawful-access Bill C-22 is passed. The bill requires tech companies to retain user metadata, which conflicts with DuckDuckGo's privacy policy of not tracking users. Other tech companies, including Signal and Windscribe, have also expressed concerns about the bill and its implications for user privacy.
- ▪DuckDuckGo will stop offering its VPN in Canada if Bill C-22 becomes law.
- ▪The bill mandates that tech companies retain user metadata for up to a year.
- ▪Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree has indicated a willingness to amend the bill to address privacy concerns.
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Record
| Original publisher | The Globe and Mail |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-search-engine-duckduckgo-lawful-access-bill-c22/ |
| Publication time | Thu, 28 May 2026 21:53:20 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-28T21:59:38.382Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-28T21:59:38.382Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | L9g5UwbM8G6Y |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Open this photo in gallery:Gabriel Weinberg, the founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo, speaks before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington in a 2019 file photo.Alex Wong/Getty ImagesShareSave for laterPlease log in to bookmark this story.Log InCreate Free AccountSearch engine DuckDuckGo says it will withdraw one of its key security services from Canada over the government’s lawful-access bill, because the proposed law would conflict with the company’s policy of not tracking its users.DuckDuckGo’s chief executive, Gabriel Weinberg, said the company will withdraw its VPN service from Canada if Bill C-22 becomes law. A VPN, short for virtual private network, encrypts a user’s internet traffic and can disguise where they are connecting to the internet from.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Globe and Mail.
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