DuckDuckGo Gets BLOCKED by Privacy Protection Routine

"Unlike when you load other “private search engine” homepages, you're not alone with DuckDuckGo. You're actually connecting to the Microsoft cloud hosting service... And that means Microsoft knows both who you are, and what you searched for. Oh dear..."

If you read my posts regularly, you'll know the issue that prompted the title of this post would have come as no surprise to me. But it's finally happened. DuckDuckGo - the search engine that presents itself as a paragon of privacy - has been blocked by a Firefox browser extension designed to protect users from the grip of the big six megatrackers. Namely: Amazon, Apple, Cloudflare, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. And as regular readers will have guessed, the megatracker responsible for DuckDuckGo's blocking, is Microsoft.

Big Silence: What “Privacy Respecting” Services DON'T Tell You About Their Data Handling Continuum

"This contradiction, enabled by a loophole in data protection law, allows “ethical tech” companies to be considerably LESS transparent about the entirety of the data-handling continuum than “big tech” companies."

Image by Bob Leggitt @ Planet Botch

It's a wonderful development that more people are starting to care about and reject aggressive surveillance, as they steadily recognise the very real societal rot that unrestrained corporate spying and monitoring can cause.

Surveillance fears ultimately stifle freedom, and in some areas reduce public safety. We might be less likely to upload a profile picture online because of face recognition tracking in the offline world. We might limit our learning because we fear the consequences of searching for information on sensitive subjects. We might even decline to visit a doctor for an embarrassing or stigmatised physical or mental condition, because of the sharp rise in health service data-sharing with inscrutable private companies.

Simultaneously, we're at higher risk of indentity fraud, as surveillance giants like Facebook warrant themselves more and more personal data, whilst increasingly displaying a "shit happens" attitude to being hacked.

For the sake of freedom and safety, we desperately need an alternative to surveillance-crazed tech, but do we really have one?