DuckDuckGo is a search engine that claims to protect the privacy of its users.<sup><ahref="#1">[1]</a></sup> Since this a centralized service, there is no way to prove that it isn't spyware just by
looking at the technology that it uses. There are some red flags that could cause you to doubt that this service is truly private, and so this article will just list them
here to help you decide on whether or not to use this service. Ultimately there isn't proof that DuckDuckGo is spyware- but a few reasons to suspect it of being spyware. Even though, it's worth noting that
Since the US Government has been known to compromise services similar to DuckDuckGo, it's reasonable to fear that it might compromise DuckDuckGo.<sup><ahref="#2">[2]</a></sup><sup><ahref="#3">[3]</a></sup> We don't know if DuckDuckGo has
DuckDuckGo is not consistent with its privacy policy and has directly violated it before.<sup><ahref="#2">[2]</a></sup> If a service cannot follow its own privacy policy, then you can't expect it to protect
DuckDuckGo uses clear gifs from the domain <code>improving.duckduckgo.com</code>. This is a tracking technique and can be used to collect analytics about your web browser.
Whenever you use DuckDuckGo, several requests will be sent to this domain.<sup><ahref="#4">[4]</a></sup> This is of course not the kind of behavior that you would expect from a privacy concerned website, but there it is. Do you trust DuckDuckGo to collect "anonymous" analytics about you?
If you want to edit this article, or contribute your own article(s), contact us on XMPP over in spyware@conference.nuegia.net, or visit us at the git repo on <ahref="https://codeberg.org/TheShadow/SpywareWatchdog">Codeberg</a>. All contributions must be licensed under the CC0 license to be accepted.
