Seems understandable to me. The explanation isn’t just “copy pasting” their privacy policy, either. You are misrepresenting that thread and discussion.

They’re not a perfectly secure E2E encrypted zero-trust system. They do require some measure of trust to use. This has always been true. Don’t use them if you don’t trust that they won’t misuse your data.

>Seems understandable to me.

The explanation seems superficially plausible, until you realize many (all?) other browser seem to work fine without a remote server to fetch favicons.

They're probably not collecting IP addresses or user cookies, but they will undoubtedly have a log of what their users search for, what results were turned, and possibly what clickthroughs happened from their search page. You can do all of that without retaining identifying information for the person who clicked through.

Worst case, if you go back and forth between google search and DDG, a comparative analysis might be able to identify you or people like you from those logs, but it would require some work.

I think most DDG fans would be thoroughly surprised DDG ever popped the hood or tried to verify their privacy claims, which is why I don't think DDG ever will.

Better to elude to a nebulous definition of privacy rather than give specifics. Even as a privately traded, for-profit company based in the U.S. with zero accountability for its claims, DDG doesn't even have that much IP to lose (as a Bing reskin) should it ever fold under a class action lawsuit.

I always wondered the specifics of their deal with Microsoft regarding the use of bing index. Guess we will never know.

What specifics? Wouldn’t they just pay MS for access to the API (though with some special volume discount that won’t be public)?

Yes, but what data do they pass onto MS and what do they do with that data? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31051050

I asked Kagi, and they said they aren’t forced to send such data and aren’t.

And unless Ecosia (where the quote seems to come from) is extremely shady, they are only sending two octets and not three.

Did you keep reading? This issue was subsequently fixed.

> Hi all, CTO of DuckDuckGo here.

[... mucho explanation...]

> So, we went ahead today and implemented the change for both Android (#878) and iOS (duckduckgo/iOS#667) that will move this logic onto the client, and we will no longer be using the favicon service in our apps. These changes are currently in the release phase and are rolling out live now.

https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/issues/527#issuecommen...

This needs more visibility