DuckDuckGo’s privacy abuses-- current, historic, and by proxy

Melody Fwygon

There are So many issues/inconsistencies with this laundry list of “Problems”.

Nefarious History of DDG founder & CEO:

Every link under this header is effectively broken except the wikipedia link.
Yes; onion links count as broken my friend. You need to link the clearweb version too for our clearweb using readers. Furthermore it is more difficult for the casual reader to verify that the server they arrive on when they use an onion link is actually the source it claims to be coming from. (Because TOR onions do anonymize locations)

Direct Privacy Abuse:

Link is broken; onions don’t resolve on clearweb
Reaction link is broken (timeout)
this is a good testable procedure to show your concerns
four year old source that seems to heavily imply that this is just normal use of the Canvas API for layout purposes. source questionable; as it is not a typical tech news focused reporting outlet.
The FAQ states why certain engines are not included with the browser but I see no hard refusal language. They do call it out that the relevant providers went silent when asked how things work and offer this as the reason why they have not yet chosen to include them. It’s entirely possible that if the companies explained their ad-tech to Epic team’s satisfaction they might consider the partnership. We know they probably won’t explain that tech; but the possibility exists based on this document alone.
This is probably a reasonable source; and if this isn’t ever printed in English or made available in English ever; I can understand. However the lack of an English language version of this source could be frustrating. I did run it through translate and verify the claim though it’s just one line in a newsletter.

Censorship

This entire header is irrelevant. DuckDuckGo isn’t specifically censoring the content. However; downstream search engines such as Google and Yahoo definitely ARE and DDG is returning what they do.
No, they are not complicit in censorship by doing this; they are just as affected by it as you and I are and are working with the data they can obtain.
Censorship requires specific action to suppress information and it is not evident that DDG is doing so in the example provided in the source links.

Cloudflare

The reasons under this header are also irrelevant. These are nasty things that Cloudflare is doing. Go yell at Cloudflare.
I’d suspect that DDG didn’t do their homework on Cloudflare; but the alternatives to Cloudflare are simply not large at all; and may have been more costly.
Not defending their choice to go with Cloudflare but; Cloudflare does have a rather absurd near-monopoly on the kinds of services they can provide.
Show me a viable alternative to Cloudflare that meets your privacy model. I’d love to learn about one.

Harmful Partnerships with Adversaries of Privacy Seekers:

Once again you’re listing things that other companies have explicitly done. Everything under this header is largely irrelevant
Amazon & AWS: a large number of FLOSS projects use it or provide binaries and containers you can run (for/on) it.
Microsoft: like it or not they have to work with, around, near them; they provide Bing.
Yahoo/Oath: Same as Microsoft they provide a search engine.
DDG is one part “Metasearch Engine” and one part “Search Engine” in that they do also crawl the web to augment their results.

Advertising Abuses & Corruption:

All of this lacks any usable sources or proof.
Your one link is an onion; which is not a usable source link.
The IRC logs provided appear to be missing a truckload of context and IRC logs never really do provide solid prove as they can be edited/cherrypicked to show/support your argument.
The provided logs do only show ChanServ making a ban.
IRC channels such as this one are notorious for being highly focused on their specific topic as they state in their rules.
Your apparent ban in that channel Does not mean they are censoring you; but it does mean you barged into their IRC channel, probably without reading their rules carefully, and got banned for breaking those rules.
As someone who has sit in channels like that on OFTC and even Freenode before the splits happened for 20ish years; I can assert that your communication style was not civil to the standards of that channel. Joining an IRC channel to yell at project maintainers is never going to earn you anything more than a ban if their channel is actually monitored or moderated.
I may not have been there myself; but I know that is how things are typically done on IRC in general.

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