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Question: does anyone actually know what DDG does with user data? Like they market themselves as a "privacy respecting" search engine, but how much of this is t

Question: does anyone actually know what DDG does with user data? Like they market themselves as a "privacy respecting" search engine, but how much of this is truth? I'd imagine there's good money in convincing people they have privacy because then they'll provide more interesting data. Has the company ever been audited? Why should they be trusted to not compromise user privacy? Imo at least Google is honest: you know when you use their products as intended you have no privacy, and they don't try to hide this Edit: since DDG isn't open source like searx, how do we know there is ANY truth to their marketing claims? Edit: Just for accuracy, the browser extensions are open source. But as far as I know, the actual search engine isn't Edit: They made over 100 million in 2020. They clearly can (and should) get an independent audit. It's shocking that they haven't had a single audit. Even startpage has

charcircuit 5y ago
>you know when you use their products as intended you have no privacy This isn't true. Google's privacy policy is not lax as you suggest it is.
- derevaunseraun 5y ago
  Could you clarify a bit? If you are logged in they store almost everything, as is evidenced by Google takeout.
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    If you give data to Google it's not like that data is now public.
  - cute_boi 5y ago
    Unfortunately, Google takeout doesn't seem to give all the data. Last time viber stored "secret data" in google drive. I tried to download everything via takeout. It doesn't seem to include those data.
zagrebian 5y ago
If Duck really collects user data, the moment this is found out, they’re dead, so for that reason alone, they probably don’t do it. The alternative is that they’re betting everything on nobody ever finding out which sounds crazy.
- throwawaybutwhy 5y ago
  A certain philosopher named Occam would suggest that the simplest explanation for nobody finding out so far is that it is three-letter agencies who might be the ultimate funders and data buyers.
  - Tao331 5y ago
    "For nothing ought to be posited without a reason given, unless it is self-evident (literally, known through itself) or known by experience or proved by the authority of Sacred Scripture." So I guess you're going with interpreting the scripture as "render unto Caesar that [data] which belongs to Caesar"?
  - kevinh 5y ago
    Surely the simplest explanation would be that no one has found out because they don't actually collect the data.
  - jstanley 5y ago
    Is that really the simplest explanation? Or is the simplest explanation that they're not lying and they do what they say they do?
  - girvo 5y ago
    That’s a pretty wild misapplication of Mr. Occams blade, I’d think. There are much simpler explanations than that.
  - kwatsonafter 5y ago
    A certain philosopher named Occam would suggest that appeals to conspiracy are much harder to substantiate than appeals to incompetence or irresponsibility.
s3p 5y ago
I read about a Github issue [1] where someone reports that all websites a user clicks on to DDG servers. Reading the employee's response was eye opening. They literally do not care if it has a bad look, they just say "we don't collect your personal information." What??? They are literally admitting to collecting domains in the feed of the Github issue but then just copy and paste their manifesto and expect us to think it's fine. I seriously do not understand this. [1] https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/issues/527 https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/issues/527
- derevaunseraun 5y ago
  This needs more visibility
- girvo 5y ago
  Seems understandable to me. The explanation isn’t just “copy pasting” their privacy policy, either. You are misrepresenting that thread and discussion. They’re not a perfectly secure E2E encrypted zero-trust system. They do require some measure of trust to use. This has always been true. Don’t use them if you don’t trust that they won’t misuse your data.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >Seems understandable to me. The explanation seems superficially plausible, until you realize many (all?) other browser seem to work fine without a remote server to fetch favicons.
  - BizarroLand 5y ago
    They're probably not collecting IP addresses or user cookies, but they will undoubtedly have a log of what their users search for, what results were turned, and possibly what clickthroughs happened from their search page. You can do all of that without retaining identifying information for the person who clicked through. Worst case, if you go back and forth between google search and DDG, a comparative analysis might be able to identify you or people like you from those logs, but it would require some work.
- 5y ago
autoexec 5y ago
Here's my take: Duckduckgo could easily be fully owned and operated by some three letter agency. The NSA is already able to go onsite and tap into the data that passes through corporations and they've been doing exactly that for decades (see Room 641A) and they can force corporations to keep silent about it using national security letters. You should already assume that every US based company is sending every scrap of data you give them to the state. With no way to avoid your data from going to the state, what are you left with? Worries over companies collecting, selling, and using your data against you. That's a very real and perfectly valid concern. We know that other search engines are doing those things, so it's best not to use them if we can avoid it. Duckduckgo might be doing those things, which at least gives us a chance, and even if they are it'd be better to hand your data over to several different companies than to give them all to one source (like Google for example) because the more data points any one company has on you the more control they have over you. The worst case scenario would be that Duckduckgo is actually secretly run by Google and the data being collecting from the service is being used to help fill your dossier at Google but if that's the case we're never going to know about it until a whistleblower comes forward. As defeatist as this all sounds, I do believe in taking steps to try to protect your privacy where you can, and I take many steps that go far beyond what most people are willing to, but we also have to accept the reality of the situation we have where our laws and regulations do not protect us, and there is very little we can do to protect ourselves but depend on others to do what they say. That's why I use duckduckgo right now. not because it's trustworthy (we can't know that), but because they might be and that's (sadly) the best option we have at the moment.
- robbrown451 5y ago
  > The worst case scenario would be that Duckduckgo is actually secretly run by Google and the data being collecting from the service is being used to help fill your dossier at Google but if that's the case we're never going to know about it until a whistleblower comes forward. The problem with this (and most other conspiratorial thinking) is that of course a whistleblower is going to come forward. Are you thinking that every employee of DuckDuckGo that knows this (and many would have to), is paid so highly as to just be quiet? That not one of them thinks, "hey, it would be fun to be famous? It would be fun to expose this thing that is suddenly going to make me a hero to millions? I could write a book about it afterwards and make a ton of money..." And of course, Google would consider this in the first place. Like "maybe this isn't a great idea, because secrets like that are hard to keep? And maybe this could destroy our company and that kind of risk isn't a great idea?"
colordrops 5y ago
I used them nearly exclusively and recommended them to all my friends. Once they started censoring content for political reasons (Ukraine), that ended instantly.
- moffkalast 5y ago
  I've always been a bit suspicious that despite having seemingly no way of making revenue they manage to plaster every corner of the internet with their paid ads. Like, aren't they supposed to be a damn nonprofit or something? Makes absolutely no sense.
  - caslon 5y ago
    They serve ads on DuckDuckGo, though.
  - kube-system 5y ago
    I’m not aware of them being non-profit. Not that any particular tax status precludes ad spend. DDG makes revenue from serving ads and participating in affiliates networks. https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/advertising-and-affiliates/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/ad...
- mastazi 5y ago
  > censoring content for political reasons (Ukraine) what type of content did they censor? Do you have a link with more info?
  - artificial 5y ago
    Here's one: https://mashable.com/article/duckduckgo-search-engine-russian-disinformation https://mashable.com/article/duckduckgo-search-engine-russia...
    - grapeskin 5y ago
      People complain about search engines like Google being full of garbage and fake info. DDG takes actions against that and people cry that it’s not fair. Are they supposed to just let governments astroturf their way to the top with propaganda?
jeffbee 5y ago
You're right to be skeptical. They are essentially a client state of Microsoft. Their results come from Bing and they are hosted at Azure. Their privacy policy is just vague enough to not rule out the possibility that Microsoft collects all the stuff that DDG says they don't collect.
- moffkalast 5y ago
  They sure sound like a Microsoft shell company. Because nobody that's fully conscious will ever deliberately use Bing they had to get creative and rebrand it with the usual privacy and safety buzzword slogans that VPNs have perfected in the last years.
  - majewsky 5y ago
    The most obvious problem with this conspiracy theory is that Bing became available in 2009, but DuckDuckGo was founded one year earlier.
    - brewtide 5y ago
      Bing is (a) sound of having an idea. Perhaps that idea was DDG. bing.
    - ColinHayhurst 5y ago
      DDG used Yahoo to start with; Yahoo had their own index at that time. DDG switched to Bing later, and since then Yahoo abandoned their index and started using Bing.
throwaway82652 5y ago
>since DDG isn't open source like searx, how do we know there is ANY truth to their marketing claims? You wouldn't know this even if it was open source. Open source does nothing here. Looking at the source code will not tell you their data retention policies or what is actually stored in their databases. It will also not guarantee the source that you see matches what is on their servers.
- stavros 5y ago
  It will tell you if their client doesn't send data to a server.
GycDH6mb 5y ago
I use DDG not for any concern over privacy, but because the developer tools and results are so nice. !bangs are also excellent and a huge timesaver `! mdn window.postMessage` .. so easy!
- krono 5y ago
  You can do this natively in every major browser too. You'd have to configure the triggerwords yourself, though.
winrid 5y ago
Open source doesn't mean anything. They could just have a closed source service read DB/logs and do stuff with the data.
thayne 5y ago
They have a privacy policy, and if they don't follow it then they could be liable for it. Their use of cookies is fairly easy to inspect, although that doesn't prove they aren't doing fingerprinting or ip tracking.
jjav 5y ago
> Question: does anyone actually know what DDG does with user data? Like they market themselves as a "privacy respecting" search engine, but how much of this is truth? It doesn't matter. Why? Because when going through the exercise of identifying risks in the system one can't assume the actors are benevolent and won't ever use the access+data they have for evil. That's not at all to say all actors are evil and will always do the most harm possible. Many risks are never exploited in practice. But that doesn't mean the risk doesn't exist. It still does! And it might be exploited in the future (with companies, all it takes is a reorg that puts someone less ethical in charge). Thus, when doing your threat modeling exercise, for the purposes of identifying risk, assume the various actors could do as much damage as they possibly could with the access they have. So concretely, when I evaluate risk on google vs. DDG: I won't take into consideration any "privacy respecting" marketing, that's not important. What matters is how much damage can each party do, which one is less risky? Both get my search queries which is inevitable for a search engine. So there's that risk but it's a wash. But google has its tendrils woven into far more points from which they can and will correlate data. Google analytics, AMP, gmail/gsuite, chrome (for people using that), also most people have an active login session with google most of the time, etc. DDG has a much smaller footprint on the internet from which to correlate data. Therefore, even assuming both parties are equally evil, DDG presents a smaller risk.
- ColinHayhurst 5y ago
  Question: does anyone actually know what Microsoft do with the data that they get from Duck? Other syndication partners of Bing I have spoken to told me they are expected to pass on first three octets of IP. So with other data, for example useragent, location this could likely be used for fingerprinting. Another syndication partner of Microsoft is far more transparent in their privacy policy than Duck: "Bing: IP address (obfuscated), user agent string, search term, and some settings like your country and language setting. We never communicate IP addresses along with search queries. We only send IP addresses to Microsoft in obfuscated form, meaning we remove parts of the IP address when we sent it."
- roenxi 5y ago
  Even ignoring the indirect data correlate risk; it is also poor risk management to use one company for your entire digital life. It means having to keep actively abreast of what you lose access to in the event of an account ban & do contingency planning because correlated failures in systems are much more painful than random ones. Better to just have 1 Google service you use and find someone else for the others. Their search index is a little better than DDG's I think, but the difference is pretty small compared to the risks you outline and the risk of Google going rogue and deciding I'm a Russian or committed some other similar crime & need to be booted from their services.
ecf 5y ago
Something feels off about DDG, especially once I found out that they funnel you into downloading their iOS app in order to sign up for their new browser’s waitlist. It’s like a dark pattern that an advertiser would use, not a privacy-focused search engine.

charcircuit 5y ago

>you know when you use their products as intended you have no privacy This isn't true. Google's privacy policy is not lax as you suggest it is.

derevaunseraun 5y ago
Could you clarify a bit? If you are logged in they store almost everything, as is evidenced by Google takeout.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  If you give data to Google it's not like that data is now public.
- cute_boi 5y ago
  Unfortunately, Google takeout doesn't seem to give all the data. Last time viber stored "secret data" in google drive. I tried to download everything via takeout. It doesn't seem to include those data.

zagrebian 5y ago

If Duck really collects user data, the moment this is found out, they’re dead, so for that reason alone, they probably don’t do it. The alternative is that they’re betting everything on nobody ever finding out which sounds crazy.

throwawaybutwhy 5y ago
A certain philosopher named Occam would suggest that the simplest explanation for nobody finding out so far is that it is three-letter agencies who might be the ultimate funders and data buyers.
- Tao331 5y ago
  "For nothing ought to be posited without a reason given, unless it is self-evident (literally, known through itself) or known by experience or proved by the authority of Sacred Scripture." So I guess you're going with interpreting the scripture as "render unto Caesar that [data] which belongs to Caesar"?
- kevinh 5y ago
  Surely the simplest explanation would be that no one has found out because they don't actually collect the data.
- jstanley 5y ago
  Is that really the simplest explanation? Or is the simplest explanation that they're not lying and they do what they say they do?
- girvo 5y ago
  That’s a pretty wild misapplication of Mr. Occams blade, I’d think. There are much simpler explanations than that.
- kwatsonafter 5y ago
  A certain philosopher named Occam would suggest that appeals to conspiracy are much harder to substantiate than appeals to incompetence or irresponsibility.

s3p 5y ago

I read about a Github issue [1] where someone reports that all websites a user clicks on to DDG servers. Reading the employee's response was eye opening. They literally do not care if it has a bad look, they just say "we don't collect your personal information." What??? They are literally admitting to collecting domains in the feed of the Github issue but then just copy and paste their manifesto and expect us to think it's fine. I seriously do not understand this. [1] https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/issues/527 https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/issues/527

derevaunseraun 5y ago
This needs more visibility
girvo 5y ago
Seems understandable to me. The explanation isn’t just “copy pasting” their privacy policy, either. You are misrepresenting that thread and discussion. They’re not a perfectly secure E2E encrypted zero-trust system. They do require some measure of trust to use. This has always been true. Don’t use them if you don’t trust that they won’t misuse your data.
- gruez 5y ago
  >Seems understandable to me. The explanation seems superficially plausible, until you realize many (all?) other browser seem to work fine without a remote server to fetch favicons.
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  They're probably not collecting IP addresses or user cookies, but they will undoubtedly have a log of what their users search for, what results were turned, and possibly what clickthroughs happened from their search page. You can do all of that without retaining identifying information for the person who clicked through. Worst case, if you go back and forth between google search and DDG, a comparative analysis might be able to identify you or people like you from those logs, but it would require some work.
5y ago

autoexec 5y ago

Here's my take: Duckduckgo could easily be fully owned and operated by some three letter agency. The NSA is already able to go onsite and tap into the data that passes through corporations and they've been doing exactly that for decades (see Room 641A) and they can force corporations to keep silent about it using national security letters. You should already assume that every US based company is sending every scrap of data you give them to the state. With no way to avoid your data from going to the state, what are you left with? Worries over companies collecting, selling, and using your data against you. That's a very real and perfectly valid concern. We know that other search engines are doing those things, so it's best not to use them if we can avoid it. Duckduckgo might be doing those things, which at least gives us a chance, and even if they are it'd be better to hand your data over to several different companies than to give them all to one source (like Google for example) because the more data points any one company has on you the more control they have over you. The worst case scenario would be that Duckduckgo is actually secretly run by Google and the data being collecting from the service is being used to help fill your dossier at Google but if that's the case we're never going to know about it until a whistleblower comes forward. As defeatist as this all sounds, I do believe in taking steps to try to protect your privacy where you can, and I take many steps that go far beyond what most people are willing to, but we also have to accept the reality of the situation we have where our laws and regulations do not protect us, and there is very little we can do to protect ourselves but depend on others to do what they say. That's why I use duckduckgo right now. not because it's trustworthy (we can't know that), but because they might be and that's (sadly) the best option we have at the moment.

robbrown451 5y ago
> The worst case scenario would be that Duckduckgo is actually secretly run by Google and the data being collecting from the service is being used to help fill your dossier at Google but if that's the case we're never going to know about it until a whistleblower comes forward. The problem with this (and most other conspiratorial thinking) is that of course a whistleblower is going to come forward. Are you thinking that every employee of DuckDuckGo that knows this (and many would have to), is paid so highly as to just be quiet? That not one of them thinks, "hey, it would be fun to be famous? It would be fun to expose this thing that is suddenly going to make me a hero to millions? I could write a book about it afterwards and make a ton of money..." And of course, Google would consider this in the first place. Like "maybe this isn't a great idea, because secrets like that are hard to keep? And maybe this could destroy our company and that kind of risk isn't a great idea?"

colordrops 5y ago

I used them nearly exclusively and recommended them to all my friends. Once they started censoring content for political reasons (Ukraine), that ended instantly.

moffkalast 5y ago
I've always been a bit suspicious that despite having seemingly no way of making revenue they manage to plaster every corner of the internet with their paid ads. Like, aren't they supposed to be a damn nonprofit or something? Makes absolutely no sense.
- caslon 5y ago
  They serve ads on DuckDuckGo, though.
- kube-system 5y ago
  I’m not aware of them being non-profit. Not that any particular tax status precludes ad spend. DDG makes revenue from serving ads and participating in affiliates networks. https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/advertising-and-affiliates/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/ad...
mastazi 5y ago
> censoring content for political reasons (Ukraine) what type of content did they censor? Do you have a link with more info?
- artificial 5y ago
  Here's one: https://mashable.com/article/duckduckgo-search-engine-russian-disinformation https://mashable.com/article/duckduckgo-search-engine-russia...
  - grapeskin 5y ago
    People complain about search engines like Google being full of garbage and fake info. DDG takes actions against that and people cry that it’s not fair. Are they supposed to just let governments astroturf their way to the top with propaganda?

jeffbee 5y ago

You're right to be skeptical. They are essentially a client state of Microsoft. Their results come from Bing and they are hosted at Azure. Their privacy policy is just vague enough to not rule out the possibility that Microsoft collects all the stuff that DDG says they don't collect.

moffkalast 5y ago
They sure sound like a Microsoft shell company. Because nobody that's fully conscious will ever deliberately use Bing they had to get creative and rebrand it with the usual privacy and safety buzzword slogans that VPNs have perfected in the last years.
- majewsky 5y ago
  The most obvious problem with this conspiracy theory is that Bing became available in 2009, but DuckDuckGo was founded one year earlier.
  - brewtide 5y ago
    Bing is (a) sound of having an idea. Perhaps that idea was DDG. bing.
  - ColinHayhurst 5y ago
    DDG used Yahoo to start with; Yahoo had their own index at that time. DDG switched to Bing later, and since then Yahoo abandoned their index and started using Bing.

throwaway82652 5y ago

>since DDG isn't open source like searx, how do we know there is ANY truth to their marketing claims? You wouldn't know this even if it was open source. Open source does nothing here. Looking at the source code will not tell you their data retention policies or what is actually stored in their databases. It will also not guarantee the source that you see matches what is on their servers.

stavros 5y ago
It will tell you if their client doesn't send data to a server.

GycDH6mb 5y ago

I use DDG not for any concern over privacy, but because the developer tools and results are so nice. !bangs are also excellent and a huge timesaver `! mdn window.postMessage` .. so easy!

krono 5y ago
You can do this natively in every major browser too. You'd have to configure the triggerwords yourself, though.

winrid 5y ago

Open source doesn't mean anything. They could just have a closed source service read DB/logs and do stuff with the data.

thayne 5y ago

They have a privacy policy, and if they don't follow it then they could be liable for it. Their use of cookies is fairly easy to inspect, although that doesn't prove they aren't doing fingerprinting or ip tracking.

jjav 5y ago

> Question: does anyone actually know what DDG does with user data? Like they market themselves as a "privacy respecting" search engine, but how much of this is truth? It doesn't matter. Why? Because when going through the exercise of identifying risks in the system one can't assume the actors are benevolent and won't ever use the access+data they have for evil. That's not at all to say all actors are evil and will always do the most harm possible. Many risks are never exploited in practice. But that doesn't mean the risk doesn't exist. It still does! And it might be exploited in the future (with companies, all it takes is a reorg that puts someone less ethical in charge). Thus, when doing your threat modeling exercise, for the purposes of identifying risk, assume the various actors could do as much damage as they possibly could with the access they have. So concretely, when I evaluate risk on google vs. DDG: I won't take into consideration any "privacy respecting" marketing, that's not important. What matters is how much damage can each party do, which one is less risky? Both get my search queries which is inevitable for a search engine. So there's that risk but it's a wash. But google has its tendrils woven into far more points from which they can and will correlate data. Google analytics, AMP, gmail/gsuite, chrome (for people using that), also most people have an active login session with google most of the time, etc. DDG has a much smaller footprint on the internet from which to correlate data. Therefore, even assuming both parties are equally evil, DDG presents a smaller risk.

ColinHayhurst 5y ago
Question: does anyone actually know what Microsoft do with the data that they get from Duck? Other syndication partners of Bing I have spoken to told me they are expected to pass on first three octets of IP. So with other data, for example useragent, location this could likely be used for fingerprinting. Another syndication partner of Microsoft is far more transparent in their privacy policy than Duck: "Bing: IP address (obfuscated), user agent string, search term, and some settings like your country and language setting. We never communicate IP addresses along with search queries. We only send IP addresses to Microsoft in obfuscated form, meaning we remove parts of the IP address when we sent it."
roenxi 5y ago
Even ignoring the indirect data correlate risk; it is also poor risk management to use one company for your entire digital life. It means having to keep actively abreast of what you lose access to in the event of an account ban & do contingency planning because correlated failures in systems are much more painful than random ones. Better to just have 1 Google service you use and find someone else for the others. Their search index is a little better than DDG's I think, but the difference is pretty small compared to the risks you outline and the risk of Google going rogue and deciding I'm a Russian or committed some other similar crime & need to be booted from their services.

ecf 5y ago

Something feels off about DDG, especially once I found out that they funnel you into downloading their iOS app in order to sign up for their new browser’s waitlist. It’s like a dark pattern that an advertiser would use, not a privacy-focused search engine.