Dear Tor Project,
I’m disputing the legitimacy of Duckduckgo being Tor browser’s default search engine.
This is how the URL should look:
www.podbean.com/podcast-detail/5bakh-79e4c/The-Breakdown-Podcast
This is the spyware Duckduckgo does:
https://duckduckgo.com/l/?uddg=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.podbean.com%2Fpodcast%2Ddetail%2F5bakh%2D79e4c%2FThe%2DBreakdown%2DPodcast&rut=5c2461ff3cf9724900b2808b2011523bc08f4b82046e913bb14471790466518c
Further, once you click the link, the websites themselves have Duckduckgo’s 3rd party javascript inserted into the page load, such as “improving.duckduckgo.com” to report back to their AI your behavior on the site itself. Normally what you do on the clicked sites is supposed to be out of reach for a search engine.
And then on top of that, Duckduckgo is just front-end for Bing, but it’s hosted on Microsoft’s servers. So Microsoft hiding from Microsoft is a conflict of interest.
How many times have we all accidentally mistyped a URL, where we meant to go to the site itself, but that then got searched on Duckduckgo’s AI. Sucks if it’s an Onion address, at least let me turn search off?!
Final kicker. In 2022, Duckduckgo’s CEO Gabriel Weinberg said they are actively censoring “Russian misinformation”, that later turned out to be true, when 2 years later (2024) the CIA purposefully leaked to the New York Times that they had 12 military bases in Ukraine (right by the Russian border) PRIOR to Putin’s invasion. Further the Times admits that Putin was correct for accusing the US of militarizing Ukraine BEFORE he invaded. [1]
The official Tor Project website goes on and on about protecting whistleblowers. So why is this the sole default choice for anonymous whistleblowers, if we’re just repeating the CIA’s narrative with AI spyware?