DuckDuckGo allows tracking by Microsoft - May 30, 2022

apparently DDG has a browser - i didn’t know that, nor do i care

DuckDuckGo is not safe to browse as Microsoft tracks user data | Technology News – India TV

DuckDuckGo's founder Gabriel Weinberg has admitted to the company's agreement with Microsoft for allowing them to track the user's activity. He further stated that they are taking to Microsoft to change their agreement clause for users' confidentiality.

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DuckDuckGo caught giving Microsoft permission for trackers despite strong privacy reputation - 9to5Mac

> “We have always been extremely careful to never promise anonymity when browsing, because that frankly isn’t possible given how quickly trackers change how they work to evade protections and the tools we currently offer. When most other browsers on the market talk about tracking protection they are usually referring to 3rd-party cookie protection and fingerprinting protection, and our browsers for iOS, Android, and our new Mac beta, impose these restrictions on third-party tracking scripts, including those from Microsoft.
What we’re talking about here is an above-and-beyond protection that most browsers don’t even attempt to do — that is, blocking third-party tracking scripts before they load on 3rd party websites. Because we’re doing this where we can, users are still getting significantly more privacy protection with DuckDuckGo than they would using Safari, Firefox and other browsers. This blog post we published gets into the real benefits users enjoy from this approach, like faster load times (46% average decrease) and less data transferred (34% average decrease). Our goal has always been to provide the most privacy we can in one download, by default without any complicated settings.”

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“users are still getting significantly more privacy protection with DuckDuckGo than they would using Safari, Firefox and other browsers”

while that may be true with default settings, Firefox offers comprehensive protection from tracking simply by enabling ETP - add uBO and the arkenfox user.js and you have a level of protection unmatched by all other mainstream browsers to my knowledge

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This is the original Twitter thread (here linked on Nitter :slightly_smiling_face:) that sparked all of this.

Some of the reporting on this went a bit off-track, and their CEO did the rounds posting a reply, linked here on libreddit, in order to attempt to clarify things.

For Mojeek, it gives us great peace of mind to know that we’re not beholden to anyone else when it comes to providing people with results. There’s a good reason that we’re so dead-set on providing organic web search results from our own index. Dependencies can create problems like this.

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Follow-up article from August 5.

[T]he privacy-minded search company :slightly_smiling_face:

I rarely bump into people these days on the web who aren’t aware of the DDG <=> Bing link, it seems like this has started to become something people are aware of, even if they’ve not been digging too much.

One of the big reasons we value independence so much is highlighted here:

“Previously, we were limited in how we could apply our 3rd-Party Tracker Loading Protection on Microsoft tracking scripts due to a policy requirement related to our use of Bing as a source for our private search results,”

It’s good they’ve reacted, mind.