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I think "anonymous" is as fair a framing as it gets. If you publish a novel anonymously, but reveal personal details about yourself in it or use a particular writing style that lets people identify you, that's arguably an expected outcome as well.

"Private" would be really misleading.

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Just call it a proxy though, as that’s all it is. And end of the day, using better models with a VPN gives the same privacy and better performance. This is pointless beyond attempting to stop the bleeding from imploding search traffic.

DDG has made very poor technical and business decisions and they are trying to hold on but can’t escape the fact they are just a Bing wrapper. And Bing, like Google, is increasingly an index of AI spam.

Web search - from any company - is rapidly approaching full-on utility collapse.

Pushing half-truths about second and third tier LLM models being “private” will not stop the bleeding.

Which better models can you use with a VPN though, without signing up for an account?

Requiring a login makes all of your queries cross-correlate-able, unless you go through the significant pain of signing up for a new account very often (and even then, some LLM providers require SMS authentication for new accounts).

Given that, the fact that you can use DuckDuckGo without signing up from behind a VPN is pretty cool in my view.

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