DuckDuckGo isn’t as private as you think
The internet privacy company "made an exception for its business partner Microsoft to its browser's blocking of advertising trackers on websites ..."
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The internet privacy company "made an exception for its business partner Microsoft to its browser's blocking of advertising trackers on websites ..."
Their CEO responded to this on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/uxiah9/comment/i9xxjsn/
It's worth the read 👍
Thank you for sharing this. 👍
Really? I really thought that it's private enough to hide my searches.
Who ever thought this "privacy" search engines were actually private to begin with other than morons? Like literally, the internet would be destroyed without tracking and targeting ads at people. Its all a money and should I say power game.
I am currently using a SurfShark VPN service, mainly to avoid nastygrams from my ISP that claims somebody in my household is downloading copyrighted material. I don't have the knowledge and experience as to how I can prevent kids and grandkids from downloading copyrighted materials. I was tempted to switch to DuckDuckGo when my current VPN subscription expires, but thanks to your timely news article, I might wait a while before I make the switch! Many Thanks!
honestly, if you are not end to end encrypting everything and using vpn then your internet traffic is prob being processed somewhere, the question is whether anybody actually cares about your internet traffic ( like eg if it's just work tech questions i type in google, idc if others see my queries, in fact i would like them to so they can optimize my queries even more ) or if it's just an extra mental hoop you put yourself through - unless you are doing shady darkweb stuff. tbh having a few adblocks, cookie notification blockers, and tracker blockers is enough for me to save a few kb in bandwidth ( if i could browse all these sites in reader mode, i would though lmao ) - and i'm not even talking about regular phone convos and sms.
I've been using DuckDuckGo for years. Pisses me off to see this.
What are some better, actually private alternatives that IHers can use?
I've been pretty happy with Ecosia. They're privacy focused and revenue goes towards the planting of trees, with audits. I originally discovered Ecosia because Brave selected them as default based on their stance on privacy. They do use Bing behind the scenes though so I'm now curious if they have a similar relationship with Microsoft to that of DuckDuckGo.
I know that building a search engine from scratch is a tough engineering challenge, but after these years why are alternative search engines still relying on Microsoft?
Wouldn’t a real commitment to privacy lead those companies towards becoming independent of Microsoft?
DuckDuck for instance has been operating for years.
To be honest at this point I am considering going back to Google, at least I know that they are using my data.