DuckDuckGo Browser Privacy Discussion

PrivacyTools

Privacy Discussion for Browsers listed on:
https://www.privacytools.io/#browser

Feel free to post your questions, thoughts and concerns in this thread.
You can start a new discussion in this privacy forum as well.

anon007

PrivacyTools would you consider adding a disclaimer to DuckDuckGo's browser recommendation to address this concern with them deliberately allowing Microsoft's trackers?

AR45H

Petition to remove duckduckgo browser and the search engine from the privacy tools website.

On March 9, duckduckgo's CEO announced they will down-rank websites spreading "Russian disinformation", essentially curating the results and creating a bias. Indicating they might have already been doing that with other things.

And most recently it has come to light that they have a deal with microsoft to allow their trackers through.
https://twitter.com/thezedwards/status/1528808759027331072
https://twitter.com/shivan_kaul/status/1528879590772338689
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYYEwNc8Eaw

Fox

AR45H I both agree and disagree, and I will proceed to explain:

I believe that the fact that a company aligns itself with a popular trend of the moment such as the cancellation of Russian media does not automatically make it an invalid company in its sector. I am not saying that it is fair or right to censor anyone (in fact I think the opposite), I am just saying that the fact that a company aligns its products with a trend of the moment does not have to contradict the fundamental basis of its product, in this case the defense of privacy, and that is the value on which this community is based.

On the other hand, regarding Microsoft's trackers, this is something obviously more serious, although it does not surprise me at all, as it is something that we could already assume since 2021. Let's not forget that DDG uses and indexes Bing results in its search engine. We could say that using DDG is in essence to search Bing without many of the crawlers that attack us daily, but we can not forget that Microsoft is Microsoft, and as such has its interests, so we should not be surprised if they demand things from DDG in exchange for benefiting from using Bing results in their search engine.

Is it an option to remove DDG from PrivacyTools? I personally think not, because, as far as I know, except for Microsoft web pages, DDG still protects your privacy better than the vast majority of projects. It's not perfect, that's obvious, but nothing is perfect in this life, and invalidating a whole project because of a bug or a limitation like that would seem unfair to me.

What would I propose then? For starters, no, I would not remove the DDG search engine, and regarding the browser, I would add a temporary warning, to warn that, due to recent news, we cannot ensure its status as a privacy-friendly alternative. Since that warning is placed, we would try to observe how the project develops during a period of time (for example, 2 or 3 months) to verify what their intentions are in the medium-long term and see how they react in that period of time to the community commotion, and only after that analysis and based on their results we would then choose if it is still a project that we can trust or not, and therefore, if it keeps its place or not within PrivacyTools.

anomymous007

I would not remove DDG due to their decision to down-rank content. I think that's a completely different issue related to censorship and it isn't related to privacy, even if in my opinion could be as worrisome as online privacy.

The Microsoft trackers issue is a concern. I would keep DDG as an option in the search engines list, perhaps add a disclaimer as Fox suggested. But I would definitely remove the browser as an option, since they claim to block all trackers but secretly let some from Microsoft through (due to their agreements). The browser could be added back later on if their commitment to protect users from trackers can be verified, but in the meantime there are many alternatives that are better, so we shouldn't mislead the users to a browser that we cannot fully trust. Also, I may not have the full picture of the problem, but I don't like that they claim to protect privacy when they really don't fully commit to that.

commander

anomymous007 Wasn't it worded very carefully to instead say "most" trackers? Don't get me wrong, it's still a bad thing to do, but they weren't explicitly untruthful in their statement.

Fox

I partially agree with you @anomymous007 on the browser issue. I still think it is not fully necessary to remove the browser because at the end of the day it is still better than most browsers on the market in terms of privacy, but I agree with you that something has to be done with it, and while I prefer my idea, I also think the idea of removing it from PrivacyTools until they take the right path or commit to their words, blocking Microsoft's trackers as well, is correct.

anomymous007

Well, I gave it another round of thoughts and definitely further discussion will be needed to decided whether DDG should be removed. But a warning should be added as soon as possible, since given what we know today DuckDuckGo doesn't protect privacy anymore by deliberately allowing Microsoft's trackers through. Even so, is stays as a better choice than many other browsers when it comes to privacy, even better than the "out of the box" Firefox. But again, they are deliberately lying to users, and I have a moral conflict with that.

Another problem that should be considered to make the decision on whether it's removed or not is that I couldn't find any way to protect myself against MS in that browser. In other words, I was unable to use DuckDuckGo's settings or to add any add-ons to block those trackers, my only protection against their trackers was coming from the DNS resolver I use.

anon007

commander it would be impossible for them to assure they can block all of them, because new trackers may appear and they may not be even aware of them. So using that wording is convenient for any browser or tool focused on privacy.

Regardless, I believe the problem here is that they actually skip the blocking of some known trackers from Microsoft, due to their contractual agreement. So given that privacytools.io is supposed to be a guide for full privacy I believe that at least a disclaimer should be added to this recommendation, given that there's no way to bypass those tracking scripts neither through configuration or add-ons.

commander

anon007 Don't get me wrong, I'm in complete agreement. I just think there's an important distinction to be had because the former reply stated "[...] since they claim to block all trackers"