Honestly yeah. There’s been some controversies in the past, but for someone who’s looking for a zero-effort way to browse privately and support the privacy scene (DDG donates a lot of money) it’s a great choice. Wouldn’t recommend their browser/extensions though
Definitely would agree with this. The best of a bad bunch. I use it for nearly all my search.
Did see some sketchy stuff with the android app/browser so probably would avoid… and besides, I’m in a decades long relationship with firefox <3.
Do you use Firefox on mobile as well? I use the DDG browser and don’t whether I should switch. Haven’t heard what exactly is wrong with it, yet.
NO.
- it is US-based
- the CEO is the former founder of the “Names Database”
for the love of god, use anything but DDG. Qwant is EU-based and has decent results, SearX is another one which lets you choose between instances (or host your own).
please stop taking US “privacy” services seriously. i was hoping people would know better on here, compared to reddit
No. Plus the founder is pro-censorship and weighting search results based on his own worldview.
At this point Searx is the only viable option, both in terms of privacy and results. Yes it ultimately ends up using the backend of the big three, but with customizable layers of abstraction and behaviour.
As with any search engine hosted by someone other than yourself, you essentially have to trust their privacy policy.
DDG’s privacy policy is actually fairly simple:
We don’t save your IP address or any unique identifiers alongside your searches or visits to our websites. We also never log IP addresses or any unique identifiers to disk. This means that when you use our services, we have no way to create a history of your search queries or the sites you browse.
Assuming they’re doing what they say they’re doing, DDG is excellent for privacy.
I personally use DDG, although echo some others that you may have to be a little more specific when searching for some things to get good results. If results aren’t to my liking, I’ll use some other privacy-respecting search engines such as Brave Search and Startpage.
The “Privacy Statement” of Brave Search is somewhat weird tbh. Not clear, Obfuscated.
Their Privacy Policy page seems fairly straightforward to me:
Brave Search is designed to be private by default. We don’t collect personal information about you, your device or your searches. We also don’t transmit information to the web that could be used to profile you or track you or learn anything about you. Your searches are private to YOU.
We temporarily process IP addresses to detect and prevent bots in order to ensure the integrity and availability of the service for all users. IP addresses are not retained but are deleted within seconds.
To me these are clear claims they do not store search terms or IP addresses. Period.
Of course this is what they say. As with any third party search you have to trust they’re doing what they say.
https://lemmy.world/post/1510069 :) I am very pleased to tell you Brave is shabby af
Brave as a company being shady isn’t anything new though. Purely from a privacy standpoint, however, there has never been an indication they have violated users’ trust in that regard. The latest furore you linked is questionable, but nothing to do with privacy.
Still, I personally have very limited trust in the company which is why I don’t use their browser and only rarely use their search.
Edit: My comment below was based on a faulty understanding of how EDDM mailers worked and a faulty assumption I based on that ignorance. What they did in reality is little more than sending out spam mail, it was not a privacy violation.
Purely from a privacy standpoint, however, there has never been an indication they have violated users’ trust in that regard.
That’s simply not true though.
They have sent out direct mailers that basically equated to a customer list leak.
In regards to the mailers, they messed up and passed blame,
In this process, our EDDM vendor made a significant mistake by not excluding names, but instead including names before addresses, resulting in the distribution of personalized mailers.
I hope you consider a customer list leak to be a breach of privacy. And seeing how they didn’t take responsibility but tried to pass blame, they didn’t take such a mistake very seriously or respond in a manner that instills further trust.
Yeah but I find their search results aren’t as good an non-private options like Google. So I’ve always preferred search private engines that provide Google results. Startpage is a great one but if you want one that is open source LibreX is excellent and is better than other FOSS search engines like SearX and Whoogle IMO.
expired
DDG was known as the best option for search engines but then they started talking of censoring stuff and also it has Microsoft trackers and other problems. Yes, it is still better than Google, Bing and Yandex when talking of privacy but with search engines like Qwant and specially SearX (SearXNG) there’s no reason to use DDG over these.
Its shady for many reasons… I quit using it
I read an article on tor about the problems with many “privacy respecting” search engines, including ddg, here: https://digdeeper.club/articles/search.xhtml
