There is a lot of unnecessary FUD in the article, but some elements of truth too. Personally, I have always been sceptical and never trusted and used DuckDuckGo because they are an American company. Their relation with Apple, Microsoft and Yahoo also added to the mistrust. (DDG gets its search results from Microsoft Bing and Apple harvests a lot of user data from it by offering it as one of the few default search engines on ios / macOS platform. Thanks to them, DDG is the second most used search engine platform in the US).
As Snowden's PRISM revelation highlighted, the US has outsourced a huge part of their intelligence gathering to BigTech. Thus US companies have a huge profit incentive to collect as much personal data as they can on their users. (It's not just the tech companies - I remember reading about how Ford downloads your contact list, and recent calls, from your car when you take it for servicing from their service center). So it's a no brainer for US companies to harvest as much user data as they can. Who wouldn't love to have the US government as their client, with their near unlimited wealth?
So companies like Apple and DDG have just resorted to using "privacy" just for marketing, to increase their user base, while they slowly abuse the misplaced trust of the user and slowly keep increasing the data they collect from their user.
> US has outsourced a huge part of their intelligence gathering to BigTech.
And tech people and venture capitals have realised that there's money to be made out of data. And not just for data's sake, eg. selling it by the gigabyte, but by holding to that data and offering features with that data. Take for example Facebook. They don't "sell" the data by the gigabyte, but offer advertisements which are placed to people according to the data (with some algos which are also valuable, might even argue more valuable). Same with Google. However when it comes to DDG, I've yet to see DDG ask permission to my contacts for advertisement purposes. They've yet to create an account system to link all my devices' queries together for a more targeted advertising profile.
So to me this article seems fear mongering. Should I switch back to Google instead, now that some favicons are loaded through their services? I still think DDG comes out ahead.
I have tried using Searx but its user experience is nowhere near even DDG which lacks behind Google, too.
As Snowden's PRISM revelation highlighted, the US has outsourced a huge part of their intelligence gathering to BigTech. Thus US companies have a huge profit incentive to collect as much personal data as they can on their users. (It's not just the tech companies - I remember reading about how Ford downloads your contact list, and recent calls, from your car when you take it for servicing from their service center). So it's a no brainer for US companies to harvest as much user data as they can. Who wouldn't love to have the US government as their client, with their near unlimited wealth?
So companies like Apple and DDG have just resorted to using "privacy" just for marketing, to increase their user base, while they slowly abuse the misplaced trust of the user and slowly keep increasing the data they collect from their user.