DuckDuckGo tries to explain why its browsers won't block some Microsoft web trackers DuckDuckGo promises privacy to users of its Android, iOS browsers, and macOS browsers – yet it allows certain data to flow from third-party websites to Microsoft-owned services. Security researcher Zach Edwards recently conducted an audit of DuckDuckGo's mobile browsers and found that, contrary to expectations, they do not …
They aren't a search company. It was either going to be google or Microsoft. I really don't understand how people never got that. If you want clean searching just use one in China or Russia etc... It's what I do every time some clown gets a super injunction or the press here is blocked from telling or showing us something.
As a bonus, even though they might have all our data, their adverts still don't appear because we only get adverts from the west.
So really, I certainly don't trust them more. But at this point in time, there is less damage / invasiveness that they can do and act upon with my data.
For certain things they either don't give a shit about, or actively want to expose*.
*these need to be taken with a grain of salt as they also like to exaggerate or just make stuff up.
I wouldn't just say Yandex or Baidu for anything Uighurs or Ukraine, but I would on, as mentioned, a superinjunction in a Western country.
Or that gets dismissed without being seen because the user was typing something when the idiotic modal dialog was mapped and stole the keyboard focus.
The WIMP UIM is an unfixable mess, with dire failure modes. Some day perhaps designers will admit that. Not holding my breath, though.
The only alternative right now is Mojeek (as in no Google or Bing results), but their indexing engine is quite weak and the site itself doesn't have many filtering controls.
Qwant has a much better indexer but it's only used to supplement Bing for now. Hopefully they'll both keep improving and we can someday have a clean way of searching the web.
That is a very good option, but it still has the same problem as DuckDuckGo and the others, it pulls all its results from Google. It is a lot better than using Google directly because there's no tracking or search shaping, but is still entirely dependent on them and how their algorithms define their index.
Maybe the solution is to split up the problem. Have a government funded crawler that builds an unsorted index, then give access to anyone who wants to build their own engine from it. The heavy lifting of building a search engine is trawling the internet for all the data in the first place, that's why only Google and Microsoft (and rumouredly Apple) can afford to.
This issue is nothing to do with duckduckgo search - that doesn't use trackers - it's only relevant if you're using the duckduckgo *browser*.
Think of the "Enhanced Tracking Protection" in firefox where it identifies & blocks known trackers - the duckduckgo browser doesn't actively block MS's trackers.
You know if you installed UBlock Origin you would see a huge drop in all ads. I literally don't remember the last time I saw an advert that wasn't during a video on YouTube. I think it's been maybe a decade or more.
With the added bonus that if they don't exist then they can't track me, install malware or piss me off with flashy graphics and sound like those old hit the monkey banners - one of the last ads I remember seeing!
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Why is any surprised about this?
If you use DuckDuckGo because of privacy concerns, surely you'd know it's pretty much just a customised version of Bing? And from that worked out that there would almost certainly need to be some allowances for Microsoft? I mean, you'd have done the research into that right? Because you care about your privacy so.
Oh, they're all fluff and are just lazy. Sorry, forgot about that.
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