Bill C-22 Tech Exodus: DuckDuckGo Threatens to Pull VPN Service

Canada’s ongoing Bill C-22 tech exodus continues with DuckDuckGo threatening to pull VPN services. This as they contemplate search.

Bill C-22, Canada’s Lawful Access bill (aka warrantless wiretapping), is triggering a massive exodus of tech companies that seems to be growing by the week. Previously, NordVPN, ProtonVPN, and Signal have already threatened to leave Canada should the legislation pass. ExpressVPN said that logging the activities of their users is non-negotiable. What’s more, Apple, Meta, and Google have all warned that the legislation would require backdoors in their encrypted services.

Recently, we learned of another company threatening to pull services from Canada. That apparently comes from more privacy oriented search service, DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo operates a VPN service for users. Should Bill C-22 become law, the search engine said that they would drop their offering in Canada. This as they contemplate the future of offering their search engine for Canadian’s. From the Globe and Mail:

U.S. search engine DuckDuckGo says it is prepared to 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, told The Globe and Mail that the company will withdraw its VPN service from Canada if Bill C-22 becomes law.

DuckDuckGo would continue to offer Canadians access to its search engine, which it markets as a more secure alternative to its mainstream competitors because it does not track its users’ browsing or search histories.

But the tech company is planning to review the lawful-access legislation, including to assess if it could potentially capture browsers and other internet infrastructure.

Bill C-22, which is now being examined in a Commons committee, would require “electronic service providers” in Canada to adjust their systems to give surveillance and monitoring capabilities to police services and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

The company is the latest one to come out against this legislation for it’s privacy busting provisions. The concerns are consistent as companies realize that the legislation is incompatible with anything remotely close to offering services that bolster people’s privacy. Experts and scholars have already warned of the dangers of this legislation, but those warnings went ignored as the Canadian government argues that experts don’t know what they are talking about and even released a video saying that invading your privacy strikes the right balance.

At any rate, the backlash against this invasion of privacy is continuing to grow, putting even more pressure on the Canadian government to pull back from this insanity. Here’s hoping the government comes to its senses before this has a chance to become law.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Bluesky and Facebook.