But since that country is part of 9-eyes IIRC, I wouldn't place a lot of faith on that
You think you are doing something, but I have strong reservations it achieves anything except making you feel better and more in control.
Yes, if you block those. You're also not in a search bubble.
I feel DDG can be compared to Apple in many ways, but here’s it’s important to look at what Apple is doing to its Chinese users by letting the CCP spy on all their iCloud data (sacrifice all the privacy values to obtain access to China’s market). Perhaps DuckDuckGo have also been forced to sacrifice their users’ privacy to join Microsoft Advertising as well? It’s difficult to tell since they’re closed source, and Microsoft Advertising is a private ad network (anyone besides DDG/Ecosia that’s been invited?) that doesn’t make any API documentation publicly available. At least with Bing’s API we can tell that Microsoft just need the search query for it to work, but how about their Microsoft’s advertising API?
Also, for the older crowd who came from slashdot (and still says 'Micro$oft') it'd be morally unacceptable to use Bing directly. They prefer either a rebrand, or to directly give all their data to Google (maybe because they still see it as fresh and new?)
So close, but no cigar.