this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2026
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Privacy

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Do your experiments, search for the most random thing, and it will show up in Insta

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[โ€“] utopiah@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Goes against https://duckduckgo.com/privacy which is basically also their main selling point. If they don't have that, they have nothing. So... FUD until you do have data. You clearly did run an experiment, show us the proof.

[โ€“] kumi@feddit.online 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Some things that happen when I go to duckduckgo.com that also go against that:

  • Harvesting the third-party cookies it can (example: github.com)
  • Attempting to enumerate browser extensions
  • Attempting to enumerate crypto wallet addresses from extension wallets like MetaMask

It's extremely nosy. They used to do canvas fingerprinting until browsers started prompting about it.

IDK about the claim of directly selling searches to IG and likely it's a bit more convoluted than that (or OP has malware) but it's a more believable idea than that of DDG actually being respectful of user privacy. There is absolutely no legitimate reason for DDG to gather this data for the purpose of providing their search service, yet they do.