They're an American company which puts them under a lot of pressure to comply with government requests. A subpeona can force them to collect data secretly and there's no way for the public to know. This isn't unique to DDG either.

A better choice would be an instance of SearxNG, which is basically a proxy for other search engines. Since there are many instances there is less of an incentive to collect data.

That being said, using Duckduckgo is probably better than Google. At least advertisers aren't getting your info.

[–] ssfckdt@mastodon.cloud 1 points 1 year ago

@nodsocket It's true, it's a matter of comply or cease to exist. Had a buddy ran an ISP years back and he showed me one of the little "black boxes" he would be given to put on his network because he had users who were persons of interest. He wasn't even supposed to tell me that much. He's as independentist as they come and he really had no choice, it was either comply or be shut down.