DuckDuckGo sells users search information to Microsoft? | Eastern NC Now

DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg took to Twitter on Saturday, calling our headline "quite misleading" since "this isn't about our search engine and we actually restrict Microsoft scripts in our browsers, including blocking their 3rd party cookies."

Weinberg links to a Reddit thread he created on Wednesday when the tracking controversy broke. In it, he explains: "this article is not about our search engine, but about our browsers," adding that "When most other browsers on the market talk about tracking protection they are usually referring to 3rd-party cookie protection and fingerprinting protection, and our browsers impose these same restrictions on all third-party tracking scripts, including those from Microsoft."

And while Redditors appeared sympathetic in the replies, users in the more technically oriented YCombinator Hacker News forum weren't buying it.

The top response refutes Weinberg's claim that "this is not about search," explaining; "Your competitors in the privacy-centric browser space don’t have this restriction because they’re not search engines acquiring the majority of their data from an entity with a conflicting interest."

Another user replied: "The thread by the security engineer shows that the scripts are communicating back to the servers. That means your multi-pronged protection has failed, unless you've suddenly discovered a way for browsers to block IP addresses from being sent by scripts (and since they can be extracted from the request itself that doesn't seem likely)."

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/privacy-search-engine-duckduckgo-smoked-over-hidden-tracking-agreement-microsoft

You can capture data within the DuckDuckGo so-called private browser on a website like Facebook's http://workplace.com and you'll see that DDG does NOT stop data flows to Microsoft's Linkedin domains or their Bing advertising domains.

DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg did not deny that he was selling out the search information of its users. He just made excuses for doing it while still claiming despite the evidence otherwise that his organization promotes privacy.

“We have always been extremely careful to never promise anonymity when browsing, because that frankly isn’t possible given how quickly trackers change how they work to evade protections and the tools we currently offer,” Weinberg said.

https://bigleaguepolitics.com/revealed-duckduckgo-sells-private-search-information-of-users-to-microsoft/