Comment by tremon
4 years ago
Even if they do server-side profiling, they can only track you on duckduckgo.com. Last I checked, DDG did not also own an analytics service that has infested half the world's websites.
4 years ago
Even if they do server-side profiling, they can only track you on duckduckgo.com. Last I checked, DDG did not also own an analytics service that has infested half the world's websites.
> Last I checked, DDG did not also own an analytics service that has infested half the world's websites.
uMatrix shows a 3rd party request to improving.duckduckgo.com every time I visit a page from DDG search results, ostensibly to measure click-through rate. This is claimed to be anonymous, but in principle it gives DDG the opportunity to log much about their users' browsing habits.
Even in the worst case scenario you propose, where DuckDuckGo is deliberately lying and collecting more information than they claim and where those clickthrough requests are sending as much information as is possible for them to send, this is still exposing you to way less risk than Google Analytics.
It is still, I would claim, objectively more private to use DuckDuckGo than Google even in a world where they are lying about their privacy policies, purely because DuckDuckGo does not have the same surveillance scope and level of infrastructure as Google.
And that's really what we're arguing about here, unless you have a more private alternative to DuckDuckGo that has been subject to more rigorous audits and can scale to support being the default search engine for a bunch of nontechnical users?
I'm gonna throw you.com (i'm a co-founder) into that mix. We've been growing a lot and have a private mode that stores nothing at all.
What audit would you suggest for us to prove that statement? It would be great to have a some independent party verify this.
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