Seconded. Day in and day out we're given empty promises we can never audit -- now it's being done DuckDuckGo staff too?

thirded. an inconsequential token is not a suitable reason to engage in this kind of data collection, especially for a search tool that prides itself on 'not tracking' users..

Fourthed, and honestly it's strange that they are willing their promise to privacy on saving 2-3 queries on something as trivial as favicons? Why does no other browser need to do this?

Favicon what a hill to die on

For the want of an icon, the kingdom was lost !

This is the correct answer. We all remember "Do No Evil" and have been around long enough to see that sentiment die. Don't go down this path.

They've already started down that path, judging by all the DDG billboards I see driving my 18 wheeler around the country, and all the DDG ads I hear on NPR-related podcasts.

Not that I'm against making money. But there's a tipping point associated with some height value in a pile of cash, and once you cross that point then the pile controls you. DDG probably hasn't crossed that point yet, but self-justification is one of the steps on that path.

Are there really DDG ads on billboards and NPR? That’s cool.

There are ads on billboards here in Sweden.

I amazingly saw one in Las Vegas recently

In Spain too

> is what google and everyone else says.

Do Chrome, Firefox, or Safari do this? I would assume they do it on-device.

Chrome, according to my understanding, hardcodes a few favicon URLs for builtin search engines, and caches everything else on site visit. There's SQLite3 database named Favicons in your profile directory (e.g. on macOS it's ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/<Profile>/Favicons). Here's the schema:

  CREATE TABLE meta(key LONGVARCHAR NOT NULL UNIQUE PRIMARY KEY, value LONGVARCHAR);
  CREATE TABLE icon_mapping(id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,page_url LONGVARCHAR NOT NULL,icon_id INTEGER);
  CREATE TABLE favicons(id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,url LONGVARCHAR NOT NULL,icon_type INTEGER DEFAULT 1);
  CREATE TABLE favicon_bitmaps(id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,icon_id INTEGER NOT NULL,last_updated INTEGER DEFAULT 0,image_data BLOB,width INTEGER DEFAULT 0,height INTEGER DEFAULT 0,last_requested INTEGER DEFAULT 0);
  CREATE INDEX icon_mapping_page_url_idx ON icon_mapping(page_url);
  CREATE INDEX icon_mapping_icon_id_idx ON icon_mapping(icon_id);
  CREATE INDEX favicons_url ON favicons(url);
  CREATE INDEX favicon_bitmaps_icon_id ON favicon_bitmaps(icon_id);

Related source code: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/master/components/...

I haven't looked at Firefox and Safari but I assume they do something similar.

I would hope that it can also be made to cache 404 and 410 responses to favicon requests too (or at least 410 even if not 404), so that it won't keep trying to access it.

Also, in SQLite, note that LONGVARCHAR is the same as TEXT, and that you don't need to specify both UNIQUE and PRIMARY KEY (it is redundant), and that if it is not a INTEGER PRIMARY KEY and not WITHOUT ROWID, then it isn't the real primary key but just an index (same as UNIQUE); add WITHOUT ROWID if you want to make it a real primary key, but note that the way the data is stored differs then, and WITHOUT ROWID is inefficient with tables storing large blobs.