anonymous_tip

Nope, none of these have anything to do with logins, i.e., Google ad pixel, Google tag manager, Bing ads, or Yandex ads. We're not talking about the entire domain here, but particular ad scripts -- if you click the name on the page they tell you exactly what path they are referring to.

Assuming the quote here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31550090) is correct, where do you expect them to get $1 billion+/year to do this?

What makes you think they can get significant leverage on MS, a company that is literally on the order of 1,000 times bigger (Wikipedia says DDG has about 150 employees, to MS's 182,000 and market cap of 2 trillion!).

DuckDuckGo CEO put a response on r/technology: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/uxiah9/duckduck.... In it he claims there aren't viable alternatives.

Here's a quote from the relevant part: "While a lot of what you see on our results page privately incorporates content from other sources, including our own indexes (e.g., Wikipedia, Local listings, Sports, etc.), we source most of our traditional links and images privately from Bing (though because of other search technology our link and image results still may look different). Really only two companies (Google and Microsoft) have a high-quality global web link index (because I believe it costs upwards of a billion dollars a year to do), and so literally every other global search engine needs to bootstrap with one or both of them to provide a mainstream search product. The same is true for maps btw -- only the biggest companies can similarly afford to put satellites up and send ground cars to take streetview pictures of every neighborhood."

Actually Firefox doesn't do any content blocking by default on their equivalent iOS/Android apps, i.e., see bottom 'tracker content blocking' section of https://privacytests.org/ios.html & https://privacytests.org/android.html (which is a third-party audit site).

This site also indicates Firefox Focus has content blocking holes for Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yandex.

And on desktop Firefox doesn't do any content protection by default, but even their cookie protection has these same holes (see 'tracking cookie protection' section of https://privacytests.org/).

Similarly, Safari blocks cookies but doesn't do any content blocking, even in private mode.