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TiffyBelle

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TiffyBelle,
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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.

TiffyBelle,
@TiffyBelle@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

TiffyBelle,
@TiffyBelle@lemmy.ml avatar

Anyone who was around from the beginnings of the Internet will remember the evolution of ads from basic hyperlinks, to static images, to the period when ad companies realized they could abuse Adobe Flash to serve up the most obnoxious ads possible to try and grab peoples’ attention, while at the same time in some cases attempting to exploit peoples’ browsers to be even more obnoxious, run arbitrary code, or track users aggressively.

No one should feel bad about blocking ads. The people pushing them brought it upon themselves by ramping the annoyance factor up and up and up. Back in the day between the endless pop-ups and Flash ads, the web was barely usable without a good adblocker.

Ads continue to be intrusive to this day, with companies trying all kinds of weird and wonderful ways of tracking you across the web to learn what sites you visit and what you search for. Blocking them is a necessity for anyone conscious of their privacy and security online.

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