


IP addresses or user agents: see our privacy policy for details. One of the reasons it may be so popular is its privacy policy, which "does not store any personal information, e.g. (Supposedly, Anonymous also launched its own Ubuntu-based OS recently, though members also seemed to just as quickly claim it was fake.) Searches on the most common verb for searching the Internet top a billion a day.)īut one thing that separates DuckDuckGo from the rest of the pack is that it has become the darling of the loosely organized hacktivist group Anonymous, which gave it its blessing through an email to The Next Web. (While impressive, don't think that it's more than a drop next to the Google ocean. In March, more than 41 million queries have gone through DuckDuckGo, from a modest beginning in April 2010 with about 1.1 million searches that month, with only about 40,000 daily. Over the course of a year, the search engine has spiked in search queries, up 227 percent to almost 1.5 million daily. ( is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.) That is not the case with this faveicon telemetry endpoint.Search engine users concerned about being tracked and their data being used to link them to ads that follow them around as they surf on the Internet are tuning in to an alternative to Google, Bing and Yahoo: the playfully named DuckDuckGo. To be a strong privacy browser you could consider what it would take to be “NSL proof” such that if handed a national security letter with gag order, you cannot comply. Privacy policies are a patch for insufficient privacy engineering. ISP or nation state firewall operators who are certainly not bound by your ‘just trust us’ privacy policy.

The fact this browser connects to that endpoint reveals demographics (choice of privacy browser) and behaviors (when and how much web surfing) to e.g. You’re leaking browser usage telemetry to every single party to that traffic - the source IP address PII you mention is in unencrypted metadata. You knowing it means others can know it if you break trust or are required to comply with authorities.Īnd regardless of end-to-end encryption, that this user is phoning home to your fave icon endpoint, when, and from what IP, is revealed to every ISP in the chain. Most normals think of collect as become known not as permanently store. To be more clear, your staff, and you, have said PII ‘like IP addresses’, and have said ‘thrown away’ some places and ‘not collected’ others.Ĭontrary to this framing, it’s not possible to not incidentally become aware of every single browser users’ usage timing and user IP addresses if the browsers are phoning home this way - a colloquial understanding of ‘collect’, not the James Clapper NSA dodge definition of ‘collect’.
