> US has outsourced a huge part of their intelligence gathering to BigTech. And tech people and venture capitals have realised that there's money to be made ou

> US has outsourced a huge part of their intelligence gathering to BigTech. And tech people and venture capitals have realised that there's money to be made out of data. And not just for data's sake, eg. selling it by the gigabyte, but by holding to that data and offering features with that data. Take for example Facebook. They don't "sell" the data by the gigabyte, but offer advertisements which are placed to people according to the data (with some algos which are also valuable, might even argue more valuable). Same with Google. However when it comes to DDG, I've yet to see DDG ask permission to my contacts for advertisement purposes. They've yet to create an account system to link all my devices' queries together for a more targeted advertising profile. So to me this article seems fear mongering. Should I switch back to Google instead, now that some favicons are loaded through their services? I still think DDG comes out ahead. I have tried using Searx but its user experience is nowhere near even DDG which lacks behind Google, too.