BRbrindy·Sep 14, 2023
We fixed this issue a long time ago.
https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/pull/878
Thanks
In How mobile apps illegally share personal dataduckduckgo
Android
Kotlin2016–2023
duckduckgo / Android
Android
DuckDuckGo Android App
17Distinct people
18Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
4.9KGitHub stars
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What it is
DuckDuckGo Android App
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Where it is used
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year18 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-12-14 19:37:51 UTC to 2023-09-14 17:41:46 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 2 | 5 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
What Hacker News says
18 sourcesI use and love DuckDuckGo Android app! The browser part suits my workflow very well. The pinned favorites, the tabs not accumulating forever like in Chrome, it's just great all around!
But it's not as privacy-friendly as you'd think. For example all favorites and bookmarks favicons are routed through their server. Which would be nice as an option, but you can't opt out. They pinky-swear they don't log it, though.
https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/issues/527#issuecommen...
In How mobile apps illegally share personal dataLots of things I like about the site. For one, I value that privacy has been highlighted.
On a slight negative... they feature Firefox but it requires so much work to tweak. I feel this is a reflex recommendation though I do, very much, like that FF allows itself to be tweaked.
On the Desktop... I much prefer LibreWolf - which I didn't see listed. It is what Firefox should be.
On mobile, I prefer DuckDuckGo's Android browser (also not listed). Firefox mobile comes bundled with 3 tracking companies - each collecting a mountain of information! Why must you always shoot yourself in the foot, Mozilla? It's never ending.
DDG is not only open source (https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android) but it also does <strike>not have a single tracker</strike> (thanks for this, byyll). If that wasn't enough, it comes with a module called App Tracking Protec
Read the rest
tion. It's brilliant. It blocks trackers from other apps. I cannot recommend this enough. The sheer amount of information collected from apps on your phone...
I have had apps at 30 attempts in the first few seconds and reach 1,000 tracking attempts within 1/2 an hour. Every single item - from contacts to specific location - is constantly being polled, collected and transmitted by multiple companies.
Every app seems to be running spyware from various multiple companies - even my banking app. DDG's Android Browser helps stop this.
Wall of text, time to stop. Nice site, love that it's not afraid to be technical because, unfortunately, it's necessary at times.
What a mistake
It is literally against anything Debian has done the past decades
Why would they choose a proprietary software and proprietary service?
Chromium at least has a BSD like license and is open source [1], the search provider alternative should be similar
Literally nobody can confirm DDG's privacy claims, they refused every independent audits and your search is leaking to their servers [2], it happened again [3]
And let's not forget the Microsoft Bing trackers ;)
[1] - https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/LICENS...
[2] - https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/issues/527
[3] - https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/issues/2004
In Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDGDuckDuckGo refused every independent audits
DuckDuckGo android app leaks your identity and websites you visit to them [1], issue they closed with a surprising reply
Issue happened again years later [2]
DuckDuckGo got caught with their shady terms with Microsoft (bing tracker drama)
They estimate 70M-100M users [3], you don't make 100M a year with that amount of users, either Microsoft overpaid them for the tracker, or they are hiding something
It's impossible to find their detailed earning reports, so nobody can confirm their claims, and yet it's being promoted as a privacy focused search by the media all around the world, why? despite these major flaws? i don't know
So who knows what they do else?
[1] - https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/issues/527
[2] - https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/issues/2004
[3] - https://techcrunch.com/20
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Did you keep reading? This issue was subsequently fixed.
> Hi all, CTO of DuckDuckGo here.
[... mucho explanation...]
> So, we went ahead today and implemented the change for both Android (#878) and iOS (duckduckgo/iOS#667) that will move this logic onto the client, and we will no longer be using the favicon service in our apps. These changes are currently in the release phase and are rolling out live now.
https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/issues/527#issuecommen...
In DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search ResultsI read about a Github issue [1] where someone reports that all websites a user clicks on to DDG servers. Reading the employee's response was eye opening.
They literally do not care if it has a bad look, they just say "we don't collect your personal information."
What??? They are literally admitting to collecting domains in the feed of the Github issue but then just copy and paste their manifesto and expect us to think it's fine. I seriously do not understand this.
[1] https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/issues/527
In DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search ResultsIt is not a privacy browser, they track you
It's proprietary
They refused independent source audit
Their android app was leaking your browsing history to their servers: https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/issues/527
They are operated from the USA, so government (CIA/FBI) has all the data they want, whenever they want
In DuckDuckGo search engine – The privacy browser is growing rapidly> they’ve demonstrated gross incompetence in privacy
Not sure I buy the example that is given here.
1. It's an issue in their browser app, not their search service.
2. It's not completely indefensible: it allows fetching favicons (potentially) much faster, since they're cached, and they promise that the favicon service is 100% anonymous anyway.
3. They responded to user feedback and switched to fetching favicons locally, so this is no longer an issue. https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/issues/527#issuecommen...
> The search results suck! The authoritative sources for anything I want to find are almost always buried beneath 2-5 results from content scrapers and blogspam. This is also true of other search engines like Google.
This part is kinda funny because "DuckDuckGo sucks, it's just as bad as Google" is ... not the sort of complaint
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you normally hear about an alternative search engine, nor does it really connect with any of the normal reasons people consider alternative search engines.
That said, I agree with this point. Both DDG and Google seem to be losing the spam war, from what I can tell. And the diagnosis is a good one too: the problem with modern search engines is that they're not opinionated / biased enough!
> Crucially, I would not have it crawling the entire web from the outset. Instead, it should crawl a whitelist of domains, or “tier 1” domains. These would be the limited mainly to authoritative or high-quality sources for their respective specializations, and would be weighed upwards in search results. Pages that these sites link to would be crawled as well, and given tier 2 status, recursively up to an arbitrary N tiers.
This is, obviously, very different from the modern search engine paradigm where domains are treated neutrally at the outset, and then they "learn" weights from how often they get linked and so on. (I'm not sure whether it's possible to make these opinionated decisions in an open source way, but it seems like obviously the right way to go for higher quality results.) Some kind of logic like "For Python programming queries, docs.python.org and then StackExchange are the tier 1 sources" seems to be the kind of hard-coded information that would vastly improve my experience trying to look things up on DuckDuckGo.
DuckDuckGo browser updated to retrieve favicons directly from websites
16 points · Open discussionThis was not about search results, where their favicon webservice is in fact privacy increasing, but about the privacy browser and the favicons it displays, where it is privacy decreasing as it involved sending information about visited sites to a central authority while you are not on the DDG search engine. For example the TabRenderer will fetch the favicons from DDG instead of from the site you are actually visiting: https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/blob/db728523240e37727...
Anyway, great decision by Gabriel.
In DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG serverscreated a new issue to track this again: https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/issues/876
In DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG serversLooks like this was an issue posted in 2019. From the looks of it, the code remains unchanged.
https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/blob/b2131d7d2f47fb09d...
In DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG serversDuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers
824 points · Open discussionShowing the 15 most recent of 18 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.