DuckDuckGo leads the list of alternative search engines to industry giants such as Google Search, Microsoft Bing or Yahoo! and recently released its own web browser. Since its inception, it has been promoted as a big “supporter” of privacy and transparency and waged legal and moral wars against Google over the processing of personal data.

But as the Spanish proverb says, He cooks beans everywhere… This was shown during a security audit of the new DuckDuckGo web browser, discovered the researcher which the corporate browser allows Microsoft Advertising Trackingeven if it blocks Google and Facebook trackers.

DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg has confirmed that his browser allows Microsoft to track third-party sites through “syndicated search content agreement“With Redmond’s signature. According to the managing director, this confidential agreement, the details of which are not known, does not affect its search engine.

It should be noted that DuckDuckGo obtains search results from other services, especially from the Bing search engine. It is also known that clicking on an ad provided by Microsoft on DuckDuckGo will reveal your IP address to a Microsoft advertising service. This is explicitly stated on the company’s website and in the company’s search engine.

But in the light of this information, it follows the agreement with Microsoft is “deeper” than previously thought. Although Weinberg insists that Microsoft does not see what you are looking for on DuckDuckGo, and your browser blocks all cookies from the Redmond company if you visit a website that contains Microsoft trackers, your data is exposed to services such as Bing and LinkedIn.

It also hasn’t been explained how Microsoft uses data from trackers on third-party sites because the deal with DuckDuckGo is confidential, but you can imagine that Microsoft, like Google and other major technology companies, is trying to make money by exploiting that gold mine, which is at the time of the Internet personal data.

DuckDuckGo, a very serious mistake

At a time when all the red lines have been crossed in violation of such a fundamental right as privacy Gaining the trust of users is extremely difficult. Its loss costs very little and this case can reduce the huge rise of DuckDuckGo among search engines, although this issue only affects the web browser for iOS and Android.

In specialized security media such as hackernews It’s a big mess and criticism of society is piling up. DuckDuckGo CEO and Founder has activated the “Damage Inspection” phase and ensures that DuckDuckGo users “Still receiving significantly greater privacy protection” than in Chrome, Safari, Firefox and more.

The CEO tries to clarify this “This case deals with excellent protection that most browsers don’t even try, ie blocking third-party tracking scripts before loading them on third-party sites.”. He also said that they are working to eliminate this type of tracking and are more transparent in application store descriptions.

We do not know if these explanations convinced you. Apart from the monitoring itself, the worst thing is that DuckDuckGo did not disclose the authorization of Microsoft trackers. until the security researcher finds out. Bad practice that others routinely do, but if you are a “champion” of transparency in the processing of personal data, you cannot afford it.

Reputation damage has already been caused and it is a pity, because this open source development, which relies on privacy as the main function (and in fact is the default engine in the TOR browser), is very necessary as an alternative to the engines of a large technology company. it’s definitely more private than theirs, but not as private as we thought.