DuckDuckGo allows Microsoft trackers through the gate?īuilding a useful web search engine is no easy task, one of the reasons that Google still dominates the space after more than 20 years. This search partnership agreement appears to be giving Bing and LinkedIn special permission to engage in user tracking for those using the DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser, as confirmed by DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg.

The company pulls results from a variety of partners, but relies heavily on Bing results that are filtered for extra user privacy. ‘That’s why we have always been extremely careful to never promise anonymity when browsing outside our search engine, because that frankly isn’t possible. Holistically though I believe what we offer is the best thing out there for mainstream users who want simple privacy protection without breaking things, and that is our product vision.Questions have now been raised about DuckDuckGo’s relationship with Microsoft. And we face many constraints: platform constraints (we can’t offer all protections on every platform do to limited APIs or other restrictions), limited contractual constraints (like in this case), breakage constraints (blocking some things totally breaks web experiences), and of course the evolving tracking arms race that we constantly work to keep ahead of. ‘I know our product is not perfect and will never be. He continued: ‘Because we’re doing this where we can, users are still getting significantly more privacy protection with DuckDuckGo than they would using Safari, Firefox and other browsers. Gabriel Weinberg is the CEO and founder of DuckDuckGo (Credits: DuckDuckGo)

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