Duck Tales: How we privately sync bookmarks, passwords & AI chats across your devices, without you needing an account (Ep.27)

In this episode, Beah (Chief Product Officer) and Emanuele (Engineering) discuss Sync — which lets you have consistent bookmarks, passwords, and AI chats across devices — how it’s unique from a privacy perspective, and what’s coming next.

Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.

Beah: Hi, welcome to Duck Tales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering or approach to AI. In this episode, we’re going to talk about our Sync feature. So today, Emanuele has joined me. I’m Beah. You haven’t met me before. I’m on the product team here at DuckDuckGo and Emanuele is, well, I’ll let you introduce yourself.

Emanuele: Yeah, thanks. Hi, Beah. Welcome everyone. I am Emanuele. I have been at DuckDuckGo for about six plus years and I’ve been involved in Autofill and Sync almost from the start. Yeah.

Beah: Cool. All right, well let’s dig in. I have a few questions for you. So first of all, what are we even talking about? What is Sync?

Emanuele: Sync is a feature that lets you synchronize your data from one device to another. For example, you may have a collection of bookmarks on your desktop and you want to see the same bookmarks on your mobile device. You set up Sync and all your data is showing across both devices seamlessly.

Beah: It sounds very handy. So you can sync bookmarks. What else can you sync across devices?

Emanuele: Yeah, you can sync also autofill data, credentials, and credit cards. You can also sync, well, we said bookmarks. Recently, we added Chat Sync, so you can sync your Duck AI chats across devices. This is currently only available for our own first-party applications, but we are expanding to other browsers as well.

Beah: Nice. So like, just to kind of paint a picture here, I have a MacBook Pro, I have a Windows laptop, I have an iPhone, and have an Android phone as well. And I’m like, you know, trying to log in to Reddit in all these places. If I save my Reddit credentials, my login, my username and my password on any of those devices, then it can automatically sync to all of those. So then the next day when I’m like out and about on my phone, if I logged in on my laptop, like the password just autofills and I can log right in. Is that right? And then now with that...

Emanuele: Exactly. Yeah.

Beah: Duck AI chats, as you’ve mentioned as well, if I wanted to like, so what’s the yeah, tell me about chats. What’s the use case there? Why do I care that it’s across my devices?

Emanuele: Well, the use case, I use it a lot personally when I chats on the desktop and then I want to continue in the evening on the couch, I can resume the same chat and continue the conversation with Duck AI from there. I also use it for looking at older chats and basically maybe I chatted with Duck AI for something a while ago, and all of a sudden I remember, oh, well, there was this information that I already discussed with Duck AI, and I can go when I’m on the go outside with a friend and show my finding even when I’m on the go. Well, with Duck AI specifically, the Sync feature also increases the limits of how many chats you can store in Duck AI. The limits used to be 30, we bumped it at 100, but with Sync you have a lot more storage, so you can store a lot more chats with Sync activated.

Beah: Nice, so if I’m like chatting on my phone, chatting on my computer, I’m like, you kind of need it because you potentially are like doubling or whatever, multiplying the volume of chats that you’re having and you don’t want to be like penalized, like lose those because they’re synced across devices. You just want them available.

Emanuele: Right. Yep.

Beah: Yeah, that makes sense. Tell me, like, let’s talk about how we do Sync from a privacy perspective. Like, are there any considerations there? How do we do it in a way that is not identifying and protects all of our users’ privacy?

Emanuele: Yeah. First of all, all of the data in Sync is encrypted end to end, which means nobody but you can access your data, not even us. We don’t have the decryption key, so the information stays encrypted on our servers and nobody can access them. We went a step further in that we don’t really ask you for emails to sign up on anything. We don’t ask you for your passwords or anything. We just set up an account in a way that’s secure with basically a random string that is used to encrypt, I’m kind of simplifying things, but like a random string that is used to encrypt your data and then the string stays locally on your device. This ensures that, you know, whatever happens in the server, the data cannot be decrypted by a malicious actor. And we, as a company, cannot know who you are. We don’t have any information on you and we don’t have any way to tie your data with a specific person.

Beah: How does that compare, like, how unique is that? Like, is that what everybody does with sync and password management or is that pretty unique and how so?

Emanuele: The end-to-end encryption is a pretty common pattern in password managers specifically. Not as much maybe in browsers, I don’t think. But the fact that the account is... that you don’t need an email to log into your account, that’s pretty unique. I don’t know that there are many other companies that do anything like this.

Beah: Yeah, I can’t think of any mainstream, well-adopted examples anyway where you don’t need an account. Cool. How hard has that been in practice? What technical challenges did it create? Or was it just hunky dory?

Emanuele: Yeah, no, it’s not easy, especially when you create an account that doesn’t have an email associated with it, it means that certain things that users are accustomed to, that they expect, they’re not there. So you have to kind of create user experiences that allow users to use their accounts seamlessly without thinking about an account, but with all the features that they expect. Specifically, the recovery part is the complex part because we don’t have data. We don’t have any way to retrieve your data. Therefore, you have to save a recovery code to decrypt the data on your side. The complexities that we face are both in terms of UX, as explained, but also there are complexities on the engineering side, as we need to ensure every time that all the flows are accounted for in this sort of accountless account. And yeah.

Beah: Yeah.

Emanuele: When we start to connect certain things together, like the chats and Sync and, you know, so we will look into subscriptions as well. We’re basically connecting different systems that all are sort of blind to the user concept, but they still have to sort of contain this data. So that’s a high level.

Beah: Yeah, as you were talking, I was thinking, this is like a great example of one of those things that’s like deeply, deeply complex. And like for it to work, you just have to like, you have to boil down that complexity and like, shield the user from that complexity and present a very simple, it works, very little room for human error, no requirement of deep understanding of how it works. And I think that is a really interesting challenge.

Emanuele: Yeah, I think our UX for setting up the account has this advantage that you don’t have to type anything and you just set it up and when you have to transfer it to another account, you just scan a QR code and the data is automatically transferred via that QR code scan. I think that’s kind of handy in the setup step. But again, it poses a few challenges then in the recovery phase.

Beah: Yeah, like you don’t have to remember a password or remember what email you used. You just have a device, another device, and then let them talk to each other. But getting there was really hard. I mean, and maybe there’s still places that we want to improve the UX, but I just, I know we’ve been like finessing it for a long time. Now I’m somebody who like has to sync things all the time because I’m constantly like uninstalling and reinstalling and trying new devices as part of my job, like testing and you know, understanding our products and looking for gaps and like, so I go through the Sync setup, you know, way more often than any normal user should have to. And it has gotten a lot better. Like I, there are moments when I’m like, that was easy, which is what we’re going for.

Emanuele: Magic.

Beah: Yeah, magic. Magic.

Emanuele: Yeah. We are actually working right now on an improvement to the Sync screens. We are going to launch an experiment on iOS first. And we hope that the Sync flow will be easier, even easier for users to understand specifically the very first step when you decide whether you want a new account or you want to connect to an existing device, that should be easier. But they’re just improvements around the existing flows rather than a new different flow.

Beah: Yeah, I think one of the things you’ve done really well as a leader of this work, Emanuele, is continuing to watch the data and poke holes in the flow and basically make sure that we’re simultaneously building new features and optimizing what we have and just making it better and better and better as we learn more. I’m curious if there are any kind of in that vein or you can leave that direction if you want. You can say whatever you want. If there are things that have surprised you in the process of building Sync and getting feedback and watching the data points and so forth.

Emanuele: Yeah, I think one sort of surprising thing was that the people were not really finding the feature organically. As soon as we started building entry points where they were useful to the user flow, meaning when you are saving a password, when you are watching a specific screen, like you are looking at your bookmarks, for example, and we show at that point a prompt that says, do you want to move this bookmark to your other device? And we do that in several touch points. And again, these have been studied to be the least intrusive possible, but also to pop up at the right moment when the feature is more salient to the user case. When we started doing these promotions, we call them promotions, we can call them entry points, basically making the feature discoverable. User adoption shot up quite dramatically and basically we were very happy to see the trajectory of adoption once we start to put in Sync front and center for the users. Basically it allows them to use DuckDuckGo, like enter the ecosystem and sort of buy into the whole system. And your data is there, your browsing is easier, your bookmarks are there, you can save something on desktop and again read that on your commute on mobile. Yeah, these entry points have been really effective.

Beah: Yeah, if you build it, they won’t come unless they see that it exists and you make it easy for them. Yeah, nice. All right. Tell me what, yeah, you kind of already touched on this, but anything that’s coming up, coming soon to Sync that you want to talk about?

Emanuele: Exactly. Yep. Yeah, a couple of things we are working on. The first is allowing third party browsers to sync their chats as well. This is the first time that we are actually building Sync on a third party browser that is not integrated with our apps basically. So that’s coming fairly soon. The new screens, we just touched on the new onboarding screen for iOS. And we’re also starting to sync subscription status. So if you have a subscription, a DuckDuckGo subscription on your mobile device, currently to move it to your desktop device, it’s quite a convoluted process. Whereas with Sync, again, we move to the QR code scanning. So if you have Sync already active, the data will start syncing automatically. And if not, you will be able to set up Sync again with a QR code right from the subscription screens and move your subscription information across very easily, which means your advanced model for Duck AI, they will transfer automatically and you can resume your advanced model chats across devices.

Beah: Nice. I am personally looking forward to that because I also go through the, you’re a subscriber, let’s retrieve your subscription flow somewhat regularly. Cool.

Emanuele: Yeah, it’s a bit convoluted. And we will also look into tab sync, which is a pet peeve of mine. I’m looking forward to that, which means that your open tabs on one device will be accessible from another device, you know, seamlessly through Sync.

Beah: Cool. Awesome. Well, I think we should wrap it up. Is there anything that you want to say that you haven’t already before we close? This is your moment, man. Go nuts. Yeah, that’s a good one. Set up Sync. It is awesome. I can vouch for that. Cool. Well, thanks so much for joining. Really appreciate it. Yeah, see you around DuckDuckGo.

Emanuele: You know, set up Sync, it’s awesome. Thank you, Beah. Bye-bye.

Beah: Thanks everyone.

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