If you are a DuckDuckGo user and think that you’re not being tracked through the search engine, you may want to rethink that.
Google might still be getting your information after all.
A new report has found that the alternative search engine site may still be handing your user data over to Google.
In an interview with Rich Granville, the founder of Yippy, he explained how Google may still be getting your information:
“Internet search is the most informative and the most influencing media there is in the world. Google controls just about 90 percent of all searches,” Granville said. “DuckDuckGo talks about their privacy, right, saying that they’re a private search engine, and if anybody had 6th-grade developer tools, they can go into DuckDuckGo and they will see ‘tracking cookies’ in the site’s source code.”
The search engine claims it does not track its users, but this seems suspicious to Granville who wonders just who is getting all the data from the tracking cookies in DuckDuckGo’s website.
“What I can tell is they have targeted advertising, and they have two cookies on their site — somebody is tracking you. DuckDuckGo may not be tracking you on their servers — which I find hard to believe — but, certainly, they are handing that information off to the two other cookies. And who knows what those other companies are doing — which I suspect is Google — and who Google is selling that information to on down the line.”
DuckDuckGo handles 40 million searches a day compared to Google’s 5.6 billion searches per day all while telling users that their data is private, that they are not being tracked, and their data is not being sold.
DuckDuckGo has yet to respond to questions about the cookies in its source code.
Granville’s search engine, Yippy.com, is one of the only search engine sites on the web that absolutely does not track users and does not sell user data.