Sam Macbeth
Senior Privacy Engineer at DuckDuckGo
Bavaria, Germany
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSam Macbeth is a Senior Privacy Engineer based in Bavaria with 15 years of experience building privacy-first browser tooling and research-grade software. Currently at DuckDuckGo, he’s contributed core protections like cookie and referrer handling and improved CI/CD for widely used privacy extensions, and previously led engineering at Cliqz where he integrated anti-tracking, ad-blocking and cross-extension settings for Ghostery and Cliqz modules. His background includes a PhD from Imperial College London and a track record of shipping open-source research tools (e.g., AIS data tooling for UCL), blending rigorous academic methods with pragmatic full-stack implementation. He excels at making complex privacy controls reliable across browsers and platforms, and is comfortable working from low-level browser internals up to CI pipelines and data-driven insights.
15 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Multi-agent Based Simulation of Self-governing Knowledge Commons, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Multi-agent Based Simulation of Self-governing Knowledge Commons at Imperial College London
English, German, French
Stackoverflow
103reputation
7kreached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (26)
javascript10
firefox-webextension10
browser-extension10
firefox-addon10
adblock10
chrome-extension10
chrome-app10
google-chrome-extension10
firefox10
chrome10
opera-extension10
webextension10
web-development10
chrome-plugin10
github-ci9
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
duckduckgo/duckduckgo-privacy-extension
Feb 2021 - Jan 2023
DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials browser extension for Firefox, Chrome.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:7 releases, 696 reviews, 106 commits in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Sam primarily focused on enhancing the functionality and maintainability of the DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials browser extension. Their contributions included implementing cookie blocking features, addressing edge cases in referrer truncation, and fixing various bugs related to the extension's core privacy protections. They also worked on improving the CI/CD pipeline by migrating tests to GitHub Actions and addressing issues related to local file handling and error handling within the extension's background scripts and content scripts.
firefoxbrowserprivacyduckduckgochrome
ghostery/ghostery-extension
Mar 2018 - Jan 2021
Ghostery Browser Extension for Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Edge and Safari
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:8 reviews, 84 commits, 32 PRs in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Sam primarily contributed to the Ghostery browser extension, focusing on features related to anti-tracking and ad-blocking. They worked on integrating Ghostery's whitelisting mechanism with Cliqz modules, including antitracking and adblocker. The user also implemented inter-extension communication to import settings from Cliqz and integrated the insights module for per-page blocking statistics. Furthermore, they introduced cross-platform compatibility and desktop browser detection.
firefoxopera-extensionbrowserprivacyedge-extension
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