Other search engines, chief among them Google, save your search history. Since its start, the company’s privacy policy has been a simple one: “We don’t collect or share personal information.” Also, law enforcement isn't going to come asking for your data if nothing was stored in the first place.Now the home to over 1 billion searches per month, DuckDuckGo was founded in 2008, not in Silicon Valley, but Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. On the other hand, DuckDuckGo claims it does not share any data with third parties.Ĭonsidering it doesn't store any personally identifying information, there's really no meaningful data that it could share that violates your privacy. Consequently, this means your data can somehow fall into the hands of a third-party.
Like any other company, even privacy-focused search engines service would have to comply with a court-ordered request for data. Although Qwant tries to anonymize the data it shares, its methods aren't exactly foolproof.Īnd then there's the issue of being asked to turn over a user's data by law enforcement. Your search keywords, IP address data, and geographical location are shared with Microsoft and are stored for at least 18 months following Microsoft privacy policies. Qwant shares some of the data it collects with advertising partners like Microsoft. Nonetheless, some would argue that the mere fact that Qwant collects this kind of data is a potential privacy loophole.
In other words, they make it hard for third-party services to build a profile on you. Instead, search terms and IP addresses are transmitted differently using different services to make it hard for the parties involved to tie search terms to IP addresses. However, Qwant claims that it doesn't transmit IP addresses and search terms as a pair. Microsoft, as some of us may know, isn't exactly a role model in privacy. Consequently, Qwant needs to collect and transmit the IP addresses and search terms of its users to Microsoft. But Qwant's weak point is its reliance on third-party services whose privacy policies might not always respect the privacy of users.įor instance, Qwant relies on ad services from Microsoft for revenue.
To be fair, they put quite a lot of effort into it. The way Qwant processes the data it collects places a lot of emphasis on protecting the privacy of the user. However, Qwant is not exactly a lost cause in this regard.
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