There are substantial privacy and civil liberty issues with DuckDuckGo. Here they are spotlighted:
Nefarious History of DDG founder & CEO:
DDG's founder (Gabriel Weinberg) has a history of privacy abuse, starting with his founding of Names DB, a surveillance capitalist service designed to coerce naive users to submit sensitive information about their friends. (2006)
The "history" link above refers to a Reddit post rich in accurate facts-- verifiable facts. The moderator (trai_dep) added flair to falsely flag the content as "speculative" to cast doubt (to create FUD whilst falsely accusing the other of just that - to project. The pot is calling the kettle black). No counter evidence was given.
Then over a year later Reddit censored the post in a manner that suggests a rogue/buggy robot "automatically" filtered it as "spam". They duck accountability by blaming the bot. Obviously nothing in the post could even remotely be construed as spam. Are we to believe that a robot would censor an old archived post, and no human reviews censorship by some unleashed bot loose in the wild? Anyway, this is why the link is a mirrored WaybackMachine document.
Weinberg's motivation for creating DDG was not actually to "spread privacy"; it was to create something big, something that would compete with big players, according to an interview between Weinberg and Susan Adams. As a privacy abuser during the conception of DDG (Names Database), Weinberg sought to become a big-name legacy. Privacy is Weinberg's means (not ends) in that endeavor. Clearly he doesn't value privacy -- he values perception of privacy.
Direct Privacy Abuse:
DDG was caught violating its own privacy policy by issuing tracker cookies, according to Alexander Hanff (CEO of Think Privacy and a data security and ethics expert on staff at Singularity University).
DDG was again caught violating its own privacy policy by fingerprinting browsers. DDG responded not with counter evidence, but simply a plea to trust them.
DDG's third violation (2021): Microsoft hosts DDG's service and also supplies Bing search results for the same transaction. This means Microsoft sees both sides of the transaction and can link your IP address (i.e. identity) to your search query that Bing processes. DDG makes this false statement: "we never share any personal information with any of our partners. The way it works is when we call a partner for information, it is proxied through our servers so it stays completely anonymous. That is, any call to a partner looks to the partner as it is from us and not the user itself, and no user personal information is passed in that process (e.g. their IP address). That way we can build our search result pages using these 100s of partner sources, while still keeping them completely anonymous to you" (emphasis added). While it may be true that DDG doesn't transmit users' IP addresses to Microsoft, Microsoft has already seen users' IP addresses via Azure. That combination of data given to Microsoft makes DDG's statement a lie. The MS Azure privacy policy refers us to the general MS privacy policy, which confirms that Microsoft collects IP addresses.
DDG can change their hosting provider at any time. And they
have-- they migrated from Amazon AWS to Microsoft. As of the
drafting of the article herein, DDG is still MS-hosted. To
verify for yourself that DDG is still MS-hosted as you read
this, Linux Tor users can run: torsocks whois "$(torsocks dig +tcp +short +time=4 +tries=1 duckduckgo.com @resolver1.opendns.com)"; web users can verify by obtaining
DDG's IP address from digweb and then visit
https://ipinfo.io/ <IP address from digweb>.
DDG's app sends every URL you visit to DDG servers. (discussion).
DDG is currently collecting users' operating systems and everything they highlight in the search results. (to verify this, simply hit F12 in your browser and select the "network" tab. Do a search with JavaScript enabled. Highlight some text on the screen. Mouseover the traffic rows and see that your highlighted text, operating system, and other details relating to geolocation are sent to DDG. Then change the query and submit. Notice that the previous query is being transmitted with the new query to link the queries together)
When clicking an ad on the DDG results page, all data available in your session is sent to the advertiser, which is why the Epic browser project refuses to set DDG as the default search engine.
DDG blacklisted Framabee, a search engine for the highly respected framasoft.org consortium.
Censorship: Some people replace Google with DDG in order to avoid censorship. DDG is not the answer.
Harmful impact on net neutrality:
CloudFlare: DDG promotes one of the most pernicious privacy abusing tech giants and adversary to the Tor community: CloudFlare Inc. DDG results give high rankings to CloudFlare sites, thus leading users into the largest privacy abusing walled garden on the web.
Supporting CloudFlare compromises privacy, net neutrality, democracy, and anonymity:
DDG also donated over $186k to a series of privacy-abusing CloudFlare sites run by "Demand Progress", "Fight for the Future", and "Access Now". Despite getting nearly $70k from DDG, FFTF continues to expose their own patrons to the very evil they claim to be fighting. Demand Progress, who received $100k from DDG, posts their claim to "contest concentrated corporate power" directly on their CloudFlare site, as well as the claim that they educate people on "the impacts of corporate power over our economy and democracy" as they "confront corporate bad actors", all of which is bluntly unaligned with their CloudFlare patronage. Access Now, who received $16k from DDG, also used CloudFlare to block Tor users, hypocritically acting against their own mission to "fight for a free and open internet, advocating for the Net Neutrality principle that internet access should be offered to everyone on a nondiscriminatory basis, without favoring certain websites, applications, or services." DDG apparently does little inspection on those they donate to, as if they're merely selecting recipients with names that promote their privacy propaganda strategy to boost user loyalty.
Harmful Partnerships with Adversaries of Privacy Seekers:
DDG gets paid a commission when users visit eBay from DDG. Note that eBay has been caught sending JavaScript that snoops on their own customers by port scanning the LAN and reporting back to eBay. Moreover, eBay transactions are impossible without using PayPal, and PayPal abuses privacy in countless ways.
DDG gets paid a commission when users visit privacy-abuser Amazon.
DDG also uses AWS to crawl the web, which Amazon profits from. The Amazon partnership triggers substantial ethical issues:
DDG feeds privacy-abuser Microsoft by patronizing the Bing API for search results, using Microsoft's ad network, using Outlook email service, hiring Microsoft to host DDG's search site and host DDG's crawler.
torsocks dig @8.8.8.8 mx duckduckgo.com +tcp | grep -E '^\w' ==>
"...duckduckgo-com.mail.protection.outlook.com"(historic) DDG is was previously partnered
with Yahoo (aka Oath; plus Verizon and AOL by
extension).
The Verizon corporate conglomerate is evil in many ways:
Advertising Abuses & Corruption:
18:20 < psychil> if torbrowser is going to be recommended, it should also be open to scrutiny. in the absence of that transparency, you create an untrustworthy forum. 18:20 < psychil> we've seen a loyalty from TB toward duckduckgo, but DDG is in partnership with Verizon, Yahoo, AOL et. al. 18:21 < psychil> all CISPA-sponsoring companies 18:22 < psychil> if ppl choose to trust them fair enough, but this trust shouldn't be pushed on every user weighing their choice of browsers 18:26 -!- mode/#tor [-b psychil@*!*@*] by ChanServ 18:27 < YY_Bozhinsky> psychil: i am using Tor (thanks to Tor Devs)... PLUS brain - good bundle. I am happy. And please, don't rush to change Reality (do it slowly with love and respect). Because it's home for many ppl. They construct their lives in it. Think twice before ruining that. Please. 18:27 -!- mode/#tor [+b psychil!*@*] by ChanServ 18:27 -!- psychil was kicked from #tor by ChanServ [wont stop the FUD]Tor Project is notoriously fast to censor any discourse (no matter how civil) when it supports a narrative that doesn't align with their view / propaganda.