Actually, that's not the case. First, that page is a linked to directly from every Microsoft ad on duckduckgo.com -- it's a public disclosure for transparency. Second, we specifically worked with Microsoft to make our ads privacy protected. When you load them, they are completely anonymous. When you click on them, we got Microsoft to contractually agree and publicly commit (on this page) that "Microsoft Advertising does not associate your ad-click behavior with a user profile. It also does not store or share that information other than for accounting purposes."

I think a legal department could be convinced that "accounting purposes" could adequately cover most all of the business of tracking, optimizing, and attributing ad clicks.

"Microsoft Advertising does not associate your ad-click behavior with a user profile."

Does somebody else besides Microsoft Advertising do it? I'd guess so.

Is there another kind of association besides a "user profile" which has substantially similar concerns for an end user? I'd guess so.

This is all coming off as an attempt to cover up what's really going on with deception. That might not be the case, but if it were, this is exactly how I expect a "privacy focused" organization to communicate when they had been corrupted by a compromise to a third party.

So instead of an actual set of real protections, like offered by things such as UBlock, you want us to rely on Microsoft being ethical.

It also ignores that governments like the NSA have tapped these very networks for data (this is what prompted Google's internal SSL drive). Even if we trust the legal entity, the fact is that the information itself is a target and so are those entities. It is always safer not to send the data, but in this case you're explicitly sacrificing that safety to benefit your ad partners.

So now I also have to trust Microsoft before clicking on a DDG ad. Based on a pinky promise not to use my IP address + User-Agent + whatever fingerprint they make?

I mean, of course you have to trust a party X with your browsing fingerprint if party X is involved in serving the URL you go to when clicking on the link.

What did you want—for the URL to go straight to the destination page with no redirect through an ad-network analytics provider, making your impression invisible to the network and thus unable to be costed against the advertiser? Why would any ad network even bother to participate in such a scheme? How would they make money? Prepayment for an arbitrary guess at predicted click-through count?

Why’d you even click on an ad in the first place if you are worried about that?

They wouldn't, and DDG has a convenient way to disable ads which I am sure many users take advantage of.

Still, millions of users do click those ads, because if nobody did, DDG would not exist. A less tech savvy user, who is probably DDGs main target, came on the promise of privacy and does click those ads and is also being tracked around the web by Microsoft if they use DDG browser (from what I understand).

This is less than ideal from the standpoint of "privacy simplified" promise, but really no other way around it when selling ads is your business model.

I wonder how many “less tech savvy” users use ddg, because in my experience people who actually care about their security are quite tech savvy as a rule - not necessarily in IT though. While the others use a default search engine/browser/whatever.

Those kind of people usually do not click on ads, have ads disabled and/or use ad blockers.

But because they are tech savvy, they the the ones friends and family ask what browser/search engine to use, so you end up with 20 more less tech savvy people on the platform, and they are probably the ones that end up clicking on ads (because, again, DDG is making a ton of money with that)

Accounting purposes?

That brings us back to: What does Microsoft considers accounting purposes?

Fingerprinting the user/browser can be used for valid accounting purposes like identifying the user to prevent ad fraud.

Brave search (and the Brave browser) are both great. As a longtime DDG user I think this is the final push I need to move on.

Brave cannot be trusted. They were misrepresenting themselves and their relationships with content creators. As far as I saw it, they were stealing and lying about it. They've inserted referral codes to cryptocurrency websites. That sounds completely anti-privacy and antithetical to anyone wanting a privacy-focused browser. Sorry, but that all just smells untrustworthy.

Would you provide some evidence of these claims?

I believe this is what theyre referring to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31085051#31088549

I dropped DDG back in March when Weinberg disclosed that they were engaging in censorship and injecting bias into search results related to the Ukraine/Russia conflict. Now that we see he's sold his soul to MS for $$$, this further confirms my decision. I'm using Brave as my search engine now.

And I recently learnt that they also have the bang searches which makes them much more viable as a replacement for DDG to me. Brave Search, Andi search, and a bit of Yandex at times for some variety in results, makes for a much better search experience than DDG ever did.