Maybe he's changed. Is there any evidence to suggest DDG is anything but honest?

I don't have any particular trust in them. However, they've staked their entire business model on privacy. That would be foolish if their intent is to sell user info, because doing that is unlikely to stay private for long.

Their entire business model is [selling advertisements][0], same as Google.

[0]: https://help.duckduckgo.com/company/advertising-and-affiliat...

DDG is using a very old version of Google’s business model: they serve ads based on your search string. That’s it. No search history mining. No email reading. No broadly deployed analytics snippets and browser logins to reconstruct your whole browsing history.

I’m already sending my search query to DDG for them to give me search results. They don’t ask for any additional data. They just allow advertisers to bid on the first few results for a particular topic.

I’m ok with that.

Innocent until proven guilty. By your logic no new company can ever build anything which preserves privacy.

You cannot prove a service preserves your privacy. You can only prove that it does not preserve it.

How do you prove that you’re privacy focused? You have to somehow prove that there’s something you did’t do. That’s kinda hard, and not much different from keeping it a secret.

Just read their privacy policy: https://duckduckgo.com/privacy.

Facebook and Google has a privacy policy too. Even the NSA has a privacy policy : https://www.nsa.gov/terms-of-use/#privacy

In practice these documents don't really relate what the company is actually doing with your data. It's just something that has to be there on a website.

It's not about having the privacy policy, it's about what it says. DuckDuckGo says it does not collect anything. What do others say?

So why do you trust what they say? If Google or MS says it it's irrelevant but if a small company without any supervision says it it's true?

It's like ppl saying Telegram is private just because they say so.

> Telegram is private just because they say so.

Can you give one instance where Telegram lied about privacy?

It is very clear it is not e2ee on their website. They are private. Many privacy features on Telegram do not exist on other platforms.

> If Google or MS says it it's irrelevant

Google and MS say that they do collect a lot of data. I indeed trust them here... What’s the point?

I'll bite. How are DDG and Brave not helping to protect your privacy?

Copying from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24710306 because so many people are repeating the same misleading “hijacking links” FUD:

What does that have to do with privacy? I don’t use Brave (I won’t use anything Chromium-based while it has such dangerously high market share), but I think that controversy was exaggerated. All they where doing was adding redundant metadata (already present in the useragent string), IUUC not tied to any identity other than their own (not just an “anonymized” identity, no unique user identifier at all) to get some non-privacy-violating profit. And the phrase “hijacking links” is quite misleading — they didn’t change any actual links on pages, only added affiliate codes to the suggested omnibar completions you could choose to accept.

(Edit:) DDG I would be careful about. I still use it but try not to recommend it without mentioning https://github.com/asciimoo/searx — which I think is worthy of trust, being Free/Libre — because of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23708166.

Brave is known to be hostile. Please do not put them in the same bucket. DDG still have the benefit of doubt

Brave indeed should not be trusted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027.

What does that have to do with privacy? I don’t use Brave (I won’t use anything Chromium-based while it has such dangerously high market share), but I think that controversy was exaggerated. All they where doing was adding redundant metadata (already present in the useragent string), IUUC not tied to any identity other than their own (not just an “anonymized” identity, no unique user identifier at all) to get some non-privacy-violating profit. And the title of that post is quite misleading — they didn’t change any actual links on pages, only added affiliate codes to the suggested omnibar completions you could choose to accept.

As long as we go and just criticize, or say X should not be trasted, I think we are not helping move things forward on the privacy front. It's a good thing that people make tools. Some are OK, some are not doing the job. Eventually, overall, there'll be some progress. At least, there is a discussion and awareness.

> Google and Microsoft Edge are more private even though neither has any privacy.

This line in their post gives away how overblown that stance is. There's simply no way for DDG to be as bad as Google, much less worse than Google.

Still, I know Brave got caught hijacking links but DDG is, among all well-known search engines, the most privacy-friendly without a doubt. Especially coupled with a good browsers and some add-ons. I'm talking specifically about Firefox but I'm sure people here have some more unusual solutions they prefer.

Brave is good. HN just loves Firefox too much.

I use FF as default. Brave as secondary.

Brave also still hijacks links and Braves tor implementation actually makes it easier to track you. Also generally the team has ignored fingerprinting issues since years that allow unique identification despite Eich saying they are so easy to fix (see my history on HN Eich even replied yet all those bugs are still open since multiple years)

> still hijacks links

No. They removed the sketchy affiliate thing.

No offence but going to need some links given your HN account is in the negative.