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Drop DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo is brilliant with how they've marketed themselves as privacy-respecting (creating sites like spreadprivacy.com) and this manipulation fools a lot of people. There are several reasons to remove DDG:

DDG financially supports privacy-abusing PRISM corps Yahoo/Verizon and Microsoft

DuckDuckGo is partnered with Yahoo (a Verizon subsidiary). Both Yahoo and Verizon are linked to PRISM. PRISM orgs always deny involvement but Yahoo and Verizon have a long history of proactive privacy abuse.

DDG gets search results from both Yahoo and Bing (and Yahoo sources from Bing as well). DDG's ads are also sourced from Yahoo, allegedly. DDG is feeding privacy abusers and this much was known ~5 years ago.

Trust

There is no transparency. So DDG asks users to trust them. Hanging privacy on a promise is not a good position to be in - but if we are going to do this let's have a look at the trustworthiness factor:

  • (the past) Weinberg's previous project was to abuse privacy.
  • (at conception) The motivation for creating DDG was not 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, 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. (edit: this is a new bullet)
  • (post-launch) DDG violated its own privacy policy. That blatant and careless breach has stopped AFAIK but it's clear from this that DDG's privacy policy and statements cannot be trusted in any situation where trust is important or relevant. (edit: this is a new bullet)
  • (the present) DDG is partnered with notorious privacy abusers Verizon et al. and also feed Microsoft and Amazon.

Clearly the DDG CEO has not reformed. He has not demonstrated to the community that he has redeemed himself and earned our trust. Recently DDG has removed publicly visible ties to Yahoo:

  • DDG previously had “In partnership with Yahoo!” on their search page and quietly removed it.
  • DDG has removed articles like https://duck.co/help/company/yahoo-partnership

This public deception further suggests that DDG is untrustworthy.

Amazon funding

DuckDuckGo pays Amazon for datacenters. Amazon has become a privacy abuser due to it's role in pushing facial recognition.

Search results are heavy in CloudFlare links

CloudFlare is a major privacy abuser. DDG results tend to have many highly-ranked CloudFlare results which bring their privacy-embracing users straight into a privacy-abusing walled-garden. This is what I've noticed anecdotally - not sure if there have been any rigorous studies on CloudFlare rankings in DDG.

Edited by bletchleypark