DuckDuckGo Blog

I've never seen such a concise and well-articulated statement of this position. Thank you for presenting it! I instinctively disagree with it, but I can't actually provide a coherent and convincing counter-argument, which is probably a sign that I need to think more on it. Thank you for that prompt.

The best counter-argument I can think of is:

> the claim that only Google (or, "only organizations large enough to require ads as revenue support") can provide these services is false - Open Source solutions (like OpenStreetMap, etc.) provide "good-enough" value. That is, the drop in value from "premium shiny BigTech solution" to "less-fully-featured Open Source privacy-respecting solution" is smaller than the gain in value from the associated privacy-aesthetics.

That's a subjective statement that applies on a case-by-case basis (is Google Maps more socially valuable than Google Drive?), and won't be true for everyone - perhaps, not many people.

EDIT: for a more fully-described alternative business model - https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-revenue-model/

For the team here at DuckDuckGo, we were excited not only to hit 14M searches in a single day but to also cross the threshold of 10B total private searches served. Of which 4B were from last year alone.

We wrote a post covering it in our newly launched blog:
https://spreadprivacy.com/10-billion-fc7808c91343

It is always an amazing and humbling moment when we hit a new milestone in our metrics. Our team is so incredibly passionate about what we do. To have people from all over the world rally around this concept of raising the standard of trust online and build this product is one thing. But, for users to endorse that mission at such a growing pace and to share us with their friends and family -- it lets us know we're truly making a difference for people who want to be more private online, and that is incredibly rewarding.

So thank you, to all of you who search with us, all of you who know privacy matters, and all of you who work along side us to show that privacy is not a fringe interest but something we can all have!

No vibes and there is voluminous evidence, eg many links here: https://spreadprivacy.com/how-does-google-track-me-even-when-im-not-using-it as well as Google Takeout itself. Oh and I forgot location data and shopping records, those are huge. So the collected data about you are well documented.

Given the data, why would a trillion dollar company leave money on the table? Their shareholders DEMAND they monetize it. There are few forces against this.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/google-says-it-doesnt-sell-your-data-heres-how-company-shares-monetizes-and

Given the 2.095 trillion reasons why this should happen, and few reasons it shouldn't, you should demand evidence it DOESN'T happen. Presumption of innocence is backwards when there are market forces.

The landing page is light on details, from the about page in the browser it is based on Microsoft Edge WebView2 [1] and a blog post from last year [2] says

> It’s not a “fork” of any other browser code; all the code, from tab and bookmark management to our new tab page to our password manager, is written by our own engineers. For web page rendering, the browser uses the underlying operating system rendering API.

They may be gearing up to go out of beta as I got a notification from their landing page for the first time today

[1] https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/?form=MA13LH [2] https://spreadprivacy.com/windows-browser-open-beta/

> So where does that leave us? Everything is biased?

Yes, humans have biases. There's not a way around it.

> What does that mean when applied to duckduckgo's tweet from 2019?

Yes, that tweet is obviously a vague marketing message, but if you read the entire quote in context, it was in reference to filter-bubble biases. It wasn't a claim that DDG employees are somehow superhuman creatures immune to human biases. Obviously that's a ridiculous interpretation.

Here's the source, in context:

https://spreadprivacy.com/why-use-duckduckgo-instead-of-google/

> by blocking trackers before they load (unlike all the major browsers[0])

I certainly like that DDG is pushing for privacy oriented systems and services, but when I read things like the above, and the accompanied page, I become quite sceptical of them. They don't mention Firefox with uBlock Origin, nor do they mention Firefox's Enhanced Tracker Protection (IIRC you get asked if you want to enable on first start up).

[0] https://spreadprivacy.com/browser-privacy-protection/