Brendan Eich, Founder and CEO of Bravedirectly attacked DuckDuckGo (DDG) and undermined the defense of the search engine regarding its partnership with Microsoft.
As a reminder, search results on DuckDuckGo come from Bing, owned by Microsoft. A little less than a month ago, a cybersecurity researcher made a surprising discovery about the contract between the two companies.
DuckDuckGo caught in the bag
If DuckDuckGo describes itself as a search engine without ad tracking, Microsoft is fortunate to be an exception. Indeed, some sites belonging to the Redmond firm, such as Bing and LinkedIn, benefit from preferential treatment and can recover users’ personal data: DuckDuckGo blocks trackers from all areas of the Web except those belonging to his partner.
Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of DuckDuckGo, was transparent in admitting that the “ Microsoft search syndication agreement prevents us from doing more for Microsoft-owned properties “, he also said he wanted” change these requirements “. He nevertheless wanted to rectify the situation by recalling that the preferential treatment reserved for Microsoft was not so serious, because DuckDuckGo’s browsers automatically blocked all third-party cookies.
Microsoft bypasses third-party cookie blocking implemented by DuckDuckGo
Brendan Eich jumped at the chance to tackle his direct competitor, Brave and DuckDuckGo, both putting forward the defense of the privacy of their users. According to him, Weinberg’s words are false: The problem is that DDG browsers also include exceptions for how Microsoft trackers bypass third-party cookie blocking. Trackers try to circumvent cookie blocking by adding identifiers to query parameters of URLs, to identify you across different sites “, he explains in a Twitter thread, with supporting evidence.
It assures that DuckDuckGo blocks the “fbclid” and “gclid” parameters from Facebook and Google, but not “msclkid” from Microsoft. Moreover, DDG has made public the list of blocked URL parameters, and those of Microsoft are surprisingly not there.
Brendan Eich didn’t mince his words: Why is DDG exempting Microsoft’s tracking setting from being retired? Because it’s the least-cookie way Bing Ads uses to track users, and DDG’s partner for search ads is Bing. DDG searches allow Bing to bypass tracking protection; DDG browsers allow this circumvention to generate revenue “.
Finally, he did not hesitate to recall that Brave “ does not and will not infringe the privacy of users to satisfy its partners “.
On the same subject :
More and more of you accept that iPhone applications track your activity
Sources: Brendan Eich, The Register
8