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Comment by kayson | Hacker News Reader

The article is a little disingenuous. DDG didn't do this in secret and no one "found out". They announced it...

Discussed at length here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31490515

Some employee mentioning this on Twitter is not an announcement. That would be a press release, a blog post or at least a tweet from their official corporate account.

I use DDG too but I wish they wouldn't use bing as a backend.

It's hard to tell. Given that DDG signed a confidentially agreement barring discussion, the "employee mentioning on twitter" might have been the only feasible way to get the information out.

That said, this has been going on a while, and it seems more likely that DDG was fine with keeping it secret and the employee was probably acting independently.

I think the fact the DDG signed the confidentiality agreement willingly does not speak well of their overall priorities.

that screenshot tweet is DDG founder/ceo, so not just “some employee”

agree that official announcement would be better though

And since that post they have added a note to their app info page on Google play (and presumably elsewhere) saying

>Note About our Tracker Blocking: While we block all cross-site (3rd party) cookies on other sites you visit, we cannot block all hidden tracking scripts on non-DuckDuckGo sites for a variety of reasons including: new scripts pop up all the time making them difficult to find, blocking some scripts creates breakage making parts or all of the page unusable, some we are prevented from blocking due to contractual restrictions with Microsoft.

Sure they could have revealed this better, but it doesn't really seem like they were trying to hide it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com