Wow! What a headline: It makes it sound like DDG was compromised by Google.
spoiler
It wasn’t.
DDG protects you from Google (knowing your search history, and which links you clicked from each search) while you are on the DDG website. Of course it doesn’t protect you from trackers once you leave DDG. For that you need other cookie and tracking blockers like PrivacyBadger, uBlockOrigin, and Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection.
It is definitely an important point that up to 40% of US sites send user data to google, but that is not something unique to DDG. A more accurate headline would be “Google is tracking you even if you never use it.”
A good alternative to Youtube is Freetube, a Youtube client that prevents tracking. https://freetubeapp.io/
I like how uBlock blocks redirected links from things like Google Maps which reminds me to just type in the website. I hope it can be turned up for this too.
Use things like Newpipe on mobile for YouTube, use stract.com for good old fashioned links based on content, not adwords
Yeah, no shit. Most sites on the web use Google Analytics. Film at Eleven.
I think this comment said it best:
This is an obvious, thinly-veiled advertisement for a company’s services. It’s widely known that ad companies track you everywhere by many mechanisms. This is why we use ad blockers of all sorts. This has nothing to do with DuckDuckGo, it’s merely used as a vehicle to get clicks.
And a supplemental note from the DDG team themselves :
This title is highly misleading, implying that Google tracks DuckDuckGo searches directly, which isn’t true… please change it to be more accurate about Google analytics and other Google trackers on websites you may visit.
(copied from my response to the same post in a different community)
This post is being reported, would you consider updating the title to reflect these details? Maybe:
Google is tracking you even when you use [privacy respecting search engines, through trackers on the websites that you visit]
Sure thing, edited
