There are substantial privacy and civil liberty issues with DuckDuckGo. Here they are spot-lighted:
- Nefarious History of DDG founder & CEO:
- DDG's founder (Gabriel Weinberg) has a
history
of privacy abuse, starting with his founding of
Names DB, a
surveillance capitalist service designed to coerce naive users to
submit sensitive information about their friends. (2006)
- Weinberg's
motivation for creating DDG was not actually to "spread privacy"; it was to
create something big, something that would compete with big
players. As a privacy abuser during the conception of DDG (Names
Database), Weinberg sought to become a big-name legacy. Privacy
is Weinberg's means (not ends) in that endeavor. Clearly he
doesn't value privacy -- he values perception of privacy.
- Direct Privacy Abuse:
- DDG was caught violating its own
privacy policy by issuing tracker cookies.
- DDG's app
sends every URL
you visit to DDG
servers. (reaction).
- DDG is currently collecting users' operating systems and
everything they highlight in the search results. (to verify
this, simply hit F12 in your browser and select the "network"
tab. Do a search with javascript enabled. Highlight some text on
the screen. Mouseover the traffic rows and see that your
highlighted text, operating system, and other details relating to
geolocation are sent to DDG. Then change the query and submit.
Notice that the previous query is being transmitted with the new
query to link the queries together)
- DDG is accused of
fingerprinting
users' browsers.
- When clicking an ad on the DDG results page, all data available
in your session is sent to the advertiser, which is why the Epic
browser project refuses
to set DDG as the default browser.
- DDG blacklisted Framabee, a search engine for the highly respected framasoft.org consortium.
- Censorship:
Some people replace Google with DDG in order to avoid censorship. DDG is not the answer.
- DDG is complying with the "celebrity threesome injunction".
- CloudFlare: DDG promotes one of the largest
privacy abusing
tech giants and adversary to the Tor community: CloudFlare Inc. DDG
results give high rankings to CloudFlare sites, which consequently
compromises privacy, net neutrality, and anonymity:
- Anonymity: CloudFlare DoS attacks Tor users, causing substantial damage to the Tor network.
- Privacy: All CloudFlare sites are surreptitiously MitM'd by design.
- Net neutrality: CloudFlare's attack on Tor users causes access inequality, the centerpiece to net neutrality.
- DDG T-shirts are sold using a
CloudFlare site, thus
surreptitiously sharing all order information (name, address,
credit card, etc) with CloudFlare despite their statement at the
bottom of the page saying "DuckDuckGo is an Internet privacy
company that empowers you to seamlessly take control of your
personal information online, without any tradeoffs." (2019)
- DDG hired CloudFlare to host spreadprivacy.com (2019)
- Harmful Partnerships with Adversaries of Privacy Seekers:
- DDG patronizes privacy-abuser Amazon, using AWS for hosting.
- Amazon is making an astronomical investment in facial
recognition which will destroy physical travel privacy
worldwide.
- Amazon uses Ring and Alexa to surveil neighborhoods and the
inside of homes.
- Amazon paid $195k to fight privacy in CA. (also see http://cal-access.sos.ca.gov/Campaign/Committees/Detail.aspx?id=1401518&view=late1)
- Amazon runs sweat shops, invests in climate denial, etc.. the
list of non-privacy related harms is too long to list here.
- DDG feeds privacy-abuser Microsoft by patronizing the Bing
API for search results and uses Outlook email service.
- Microsoft Office products violate the GDPR (the Dutch government discovered numerous violations)
- Microsoft finances AnyVision to equip the Israeli military
with facial recognition to be used against the Palestinians
who they oppress.
- Microsoft
paid
$195k to fight privacy in CA. (also see
http://cal-access.sos.ca.gov/Campaign/Committees/Detail.aspx?id=1401518&view=late1)
- DDG hires Microsoft for email service:
torsocks dig @8.8.8.8 mx duckduckgo.com +tcp | grep -E '^\w' ==> "...duckduckgo-com.mail.protection.outlook.com"
- DDG is
partnered
with Yahoo (aka Oath; plus Verizon and AOL by extension). DDG
helps Yahoo profit by patronizing Yahoo's API for search results,
and also through advertising. The Verizon
corporate conglomerate is evil in many ways:
- Yahoo, Verizon, and AOL all supported CISPA (unwarranted surveillance bills)
- Yahoo, Verizon, and AOL all use DNSBLs to block individuals from running their own mail servers, thus forcing an over-share of e-mail metadata with a relay.
- Verizon and AOL both drug test their employees, thus intruding on their privacy outside of the workplace.
- Verizon supports the TTP treaty.
- Yahoo voluntarily ratted out a human rights journalist (Shi Tao) to the Chinese gov w/out warrant, leading to his incarceration.
- Yahoo recently recovered "deleted" e-mail to convict a criminal. The deleted e-mail was not expected to be recoverable per the Yahoo Privacy Policy.
- Verizon received $16.8 billion in Trump tax breaks, then immediately laid off thousands of workers.
- (2014) Verizon fined $7.4 million for violating customers’ privacy
- (2016) Verizon fined $1.35 million for violating customers’ privacy
- (2018) Verizon paid $200k to fight privacy in CA. See also this page
- (2018) Verizon caught taking voice prints?
- more dirt (scroll down to Verizon)
- (2016) Yahoo caught surreptitiously monitoring Yahoo Mail messages for the NSA.
- Advertising Abuses & Corruption:
- DDG consumed a room at FOSDEM 2018 to deliver a sales pitch despite
its proprietary non-free server code, then dashed out without
taking questions. Shame on FOSDEM organizers for allowing this corrupt
abuse of precious resources.
- Tor Project accepted a $25k "contribution" (read: bribe) from
DDG, so you'll find that DDG problems are down-played. This is
why Tor Browser defaults to using DDG and why Tor Project
endorses DDG over Ss -- and against the interests of
the privacy-seeking Tor community. The EFF also pimps DDG -- a
likely consequence of EFF's close ties to Tor Project.
For the record, this is how Tor Project responds to criticism about
their loyalty toward DuckDuckGo (their benefactor) in IRC:
18:20 < psychil> if torbrowser is going to be recommended, it should also be open to scrutiny. in the absence of that transparency, you create an untrustworthy forum.
18:20 < psychil> we've seen a loyalty from TB toward duckduckgo, but DDG is in partnership with Verizon, Yahoo, AOL et. al.
18:21 < psychil> all CISPA-sponsoring companies
18:22 < psychil> if ppl choose to trust them fair enough, but this trust shouldn't be pushed on every user weighing their choice of browsers
18:26 -!- mode/#tor [-b psychil@!@*] by ChanServ
18:27 < YY_Bozhinsky> psychil: i am using Tor (thanks to Tor Devs)... PLUS brain - good bundle. I am happy. And please, don't rush to change Reality (do it slowly with love and respect). Because it's home for many ppl. They construct their lives in it. Think twice before ruining that. Please.
18:27 -!- mode/#tor [+b psychil!@] by ChanServ
18:27 -!- psychil was kicked from #tor by ChanServ [wont stop the FUD]
Indeed, Tor Project is notoriously fast to censor any discourse (no matter how civil) when it supports a narrative that doesn't align with their view / propaganda.
Supplying an email address on Lemmy used to be optional. Has that changed?
I think that's determined by the searx instance. Some instances let you choose your UI language, as well as the results language. You can also do "site:de" if you want to search *.de sites for example.
Why would POST prevent leakage? As long as the site is HTTPS, the query is encrypted regardless of whether it's HTTPPOST or HTTPGET.