Privacy

I'm curious what everyone thinks about DuckDuckGo's current settings. I have my browser settings set to delete history, cache and cookies on closing. This creates an issue when using duckduckgo as my primary search engine. Their 'default' settings (available right below the searchbar) seem far from privacy focused. AI Chat is on by default and used 'sometimes', as well as 'advertisting' and 'location' settings that are on by default. This requires me to have to change the settings every time I load my browser due to any settings I save being deleted by my browser setup. I don't want to install a duckduckgo extension. How do others deal with this? I know you can 'save anonymously' your settings in the cloud, but I'm not eager to do that.