Why? The title does not claim to be related to the search, does it?
Additionally the way it is phrased implies Microsoft trackers get a free pass, when they are in fact heavily restricted, e.g., blocking 3rd party cookies, fingerprint protection, etc.
And the current title can further easily be misinterpreted to be about more than Microsoft scripts on 3rd party sites (e.g., other companies, which it is not).
As a long time DDG user, my stomach turned when I saw this. Following the link to Twitter, it required a lot of digging to find what was really happening.
For those of us using DDG search - this is a big nothing burger. For folks using DDG browser, this is misleading at best. The difference between the title and reality, from my understanding, isn’t nuance.
My reading of this title (and Twitter) made me believe DDG was sharing user data with MSFT across all of their properties (including search) by serving users MSFT trackers with DDGs content.
This looks like a textbook brand extension [1] issue.
Your brand is privacy. You built it on your search product. You're compromising those principles, perhaps reasonably so, in extending the search product's brand to a browser. This is coming back to bite the brand, search and all. (Per the Wikipedia article, it's highly recoverable.)
This is a reasonable position. The shift in positioning that's driving the confusion is real, though.
DDG (search) has an almost absolutist stance on privacy. That was differentiated. The nuanced tradeoff you describe, between privacy and convenience, which I agree boosts the actual outcomes, is something else. It's more similar to Apple's philosophy. Which is fine. I use their products as well as yours. But it's different in a fundamental, and to many a meaningful, way. That's going to be difficult to brush away without making it look like there's something to hide. (None of this could be said to have been predictable ex ante.)
this change in emphasis has been palpable in the 4 Ps (marketing strategy) of duckduckgo over the past few years.
But you won’t, because you are explicitly not working to make these protections “as good as they can be”. You are working to capture the user’s entire session and monetize owning that. (I’d like to know the eventual purpose of owning that, and personally I’d like to see subscription somewhere, because any other monetization is likely to be user-hostile.)
FWIW, I’m super annoyed with you. I’ve gotten countless normals — and certain enterprises with 10k to 100k users — to switch defaults to you, and they now trust you (thanks to trusting me) on privacy in a simple binary way. Which you’re proving wrong.
Now I have to do diligence before recommending your brand, and that’s shitty.