Advice Request Duckduckgo started tracking?

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alakazam

Level 9
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Mar 25, 2014
398
A few hours ago I used Duckduckgo to look up some information about a little-known cartoon movie from several decades ago (a low-budget movie that most people have probably never even heard of). Just now I visited Pinterest in the same browser and I was shocked to see one of the first pins in my feed was a drawing of a character from said cartoon. I did not use any other search engine to look up anything related to this. Is Duckduckgo tracking nowadays or what's going on? :emoji_fearful:
 

TairikuOkami

Level 35
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May 13, 2017
2,452
ADs are enabled by default on DDG. Also, if you have cookies allowed, particularly Google, it can read info gathered from other webpages.
 

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Ink

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Jan 8, 2011
22,361

You can also manually Allow/Block/Remove cookies from the site settings. Click on the padlock icon next to address bar and Cookies (x in use). If you block 3p cookies from the browser privacy settings, then it may already be on the Blocked list. Otherwise you can do it manually, then reload the page.

Since Vivaldi is also Chromium-based, settings should appear similar to this.
1562500853060.png
Image: Site settings for a website using Brave, a Chromium-based browser.
 

Arequire

Level 29
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Feb 10, 2017
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Jun 26, 2019
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DuckDuckGo collect various information which is used in some shape or form so they can monetize the service. Money doesn't grow on trees. DuckDuckGo doesn't have money trees. They have to support the service somehow.

However, it's normally known that they do it differently to vendors like Google in order to protect your privacy more. How do they do this? You'd have to ask them. Try checking their FAQ.
 

SeriousHoax

Level 47
Well-known
Mar 16, 2019
3,630
It's not Dukduckgo's fault, also it's recommended to delete cookies. If you don't like ads on Duckduckgo then I could've suggested custom search plugins but those only works on Firefox. Block third party cookies on Vivaldi, use this add-on for deleting cookies, Cookie autodelete. Set it to delete cookies automatically and whitelist the sites where you always want to be logged in. On Firefox it has the option to delete local storage too.
Tbh, to properly stop one site from tracking your activities on another you would have to use Firefox. Features like first party isolate, Multi account containers simply has no alternative on Chromium nether there will ever be I think as Google's ad business is based on tracking users.
Anyway, you may follow what I suggested above to minimize tracking.
 

Stopspying

Level 19
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Jan 21, 2018
814
I've used DDG a lot in the past but its not now the primary SE for any of the browsers I have installed.

About 8 or 9 years ago I was shown a video that was a part of a SE building course on udacity.com. The founder of DDG, Gabriel Weinberg, appeared in it alongside Sergey Brin. My reaction was to make sure I didn't use DDG much in the future, it was just a hunch but I wasn't comfortable with using DDG after viewing that clip. I try to achieve the impossible and avoid G**gle at all costs. I've read a lot of good things about DDG and its founder but the chuminess that seemed to come across in that clip made me want to avoid using DDG as much as I had done previously. I know that I and many others have probably had some innocent association with 'baddies' somewhere along the line, standing next to them on the tube or bus maybe is as far this has reached. I cut down on using StartPage when it was bought by an advertising agency. I feel more at ease using Qwant, MetaGer, Mojeek, SwissCows and Peekier for now, until someone opens any cans of worms they're concealing!
 

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