DuckDuckGo's Privacy Abuses

DDG shares "signals for fraud detection" with the Azure Fraud Detection Service and receives back "View ID" + "Fraud Vector".

The "View ID" + "Fraud Vector" + "anonymized UA" + "anonymized IP" + "search query" are then shared with Microsoft Bing Private Search API.

"Signals" could include raw IP address, just not directly associated with the search query. Microsoft owns both the Azure service and Bing API so it can just match up the two separate requests on the backend to de-anonymize the user.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/microsoft-announces-priv...

There is a lot of unnecessary FUD in the article, but some elements of truth too. Personally, I have always been sceptical and never trusted and used DuckDuckGo because they are an American company. Their relation with Apple, Microsoft and Yahoo also added to the mistrust. (DDG gets its search results from Microsoft Bing and Apple harvests a lot of user data from it by offering it as one of the few default search engines on ios / macOS platform. Thanks to them, DDG is the second most used search engine platform in the US).

As Snowden's PRISM revelation highlighted, the US has outsourced a huge part of their intelligence gathering to BigTech. Thus US companies have a huge profit incentive to collect as much personal data as they can on their users. (It's not just the tech companies - I remember reading about how Ford downloads your contact list, and recent calls, from your car when you take it for servicing from their service center). So it's a no brainer for US companies to harvest as much user data as they can. Who wouldn't love to have the US government as their client, with their near unlimited wealth?

So companies like Apple and DDG have just resorted to using "privacy" just for marketing, to increase their user base, while they slowly abuse the misplaced trust of the user and slowly keep increasing the data they collect from their user.

Perhaps a better title would be something like:

Some privacy issues with DuckDuckGo

A large part of the list is ‘they cooperate with X that I don’t like’ ‘X that I don’t like works there’ and similar conjecture.

And to top it off ‘A judge told them not to link to some sites and they don’t’. Hardly a ‘privacy abuse’. More like a typical attempt at cancel culture.

Previously discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23722063 (July 2020)

According to the author's comment, they published 2021 edition at [1], which updates some information and note other issues.

[1] http://techrights.org/2021/03/15/duckduckgo-in-2021/

Would recommend using searx.be instead. Works basically flawlessly from my usage and I haven’t seen any privacy abuses. They don’t seem to want to be big which is ironically a reason to trust them more in my opinion.

It sucks to have experiences like the author of TFA because it’s very difficult to be taken seriously.

Thanks. After reading this and also realizing it'd be better to use a meta-search engine rather than a normal one because of the aggregation of results from different search engines, I am shifting to MetaGer. I find it's results better than searx.

Also, would like to say if you have TS;DR extension installed, it has a search engine: TS;DR Search which is an instance of searx and can be set to default in firefox (which I personally use) coz firefox doesn't show option of searx to be set as default search engine.

There are few good alternatives.

- kagi.com - you.com - qwant.com

The NamesDB "surveillance capitalist service designed to coerce naive users to submit sensitive information about their friends" claim is kind of weird since fundamentally it was less so than Facebook & most other social networks. I'm pretty sure what they're talking about is how you could get paid status by inviting enough people? I've read the code (admittedly from 2-3 years after Weinberg's time) and it was a really generic site, the only thing that made it stand out was that it had class lists for a lot of countries that were being ignored by the big players. The invite function was basically manual or the standard "give us your addressbook" feature I've always hated, there was no tracking off-site or even integration with their parent company (the forever sleazy Classmates.com). At the time I thought it was kind of sketchy, but everything I disliked it did has been done worse & more aggressively since then by the large social networks.

One thing they did properly is turn off mail after a single bounce or junk mail marking - the mail loops with the big mail providers and the big mailers tell you exactly who marked your mail as junk and you're supposed to immediately stop mailing them, but that doesn't stop LinkedIn or Facebook.

Turns out that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Go figure.

and people called me crazy for warning you all that it is operated by the CIA