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I think the strongest claim they could be making is that DDG (1) collects and stores search results, and because the results are tied to your IP someone could in theory associate different search results records, to identify you. E.g. they could know that someone who lives in town X and has searched for "Warhammer 40K" a lot, also searched for "does Company Y do drug tests" or something.

It's not clear to me that DDG even does (1) though from the article - all the claims I can see are slightly weaker.

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The issue with online privacy isn’t that ads exist or that the entities we engage with are able to provide us services based on easily ascertained information.

These recent anti-DDG articles seem to have a privacy-weakening agenda. Each tries to portray online tracking as just the casual use of uninvasive metrics to provide better services.

This is not at all comparable to what ad networks do including thr large ad companies such as Google or Facebook/Meta. Those are companies that build such extensive profiling as to be harmful, a level of detail that we don’t even let our own government keep. The way the information is gathered is mostly opaque, utilises both online and offline sources and is certainly identifiable to the individual. We then see the consequences of this from straightforward harms: such as AA members having their real names revealed to each other. To larger harms such as how period tracking information is now being accessed post row vs wade being over turned.

> It's not clear to me that DDG even does (1) though from the article - all the claims I can see are slightly weaker

Exactly right! The claim seems to be that DDG's privacy policy contains text that, if you squint just right while standing on one leg, might suggest that there exists something like "an anonymized per-person search history," maybe. Or they might have used that term to mean that there is no per-person search history. It's vague.

Heh, I like the way you tell a story. I’m inclined to give DDG the benefit of the doubt here, but if any DDG employees are reading then please update your policy to be more clear / explicit

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