>At the moment I use duckduckgo and startpage as a search engine.
>You mentioned concerns about last one. What are these concerns?
While Starpage/Ixquick has not knowingly been tracking its users, there is
still much suspicion to have over it, just as there is with duckduckgo. Here
are my main concerns with Ixquick:
They are a proprietary service, which shows that albiet the fact that they
have many claims to not track users, it can still be doing so in private.
However it is not considered an attack to our freedom because it is a service
and not a software. It is just something to consider.
Ixquick also admits to tracking the user's other information that they say
"does not qualify as personal data." They don't mention this AT ALL on their
website, however they made it clear through their public report for
Europrise, which gave them the "seal of privacy".
You can read the exact text here:
https://www.european-privacy-seal.eu/awarded-seals/de-110022/
Now that I have shown you some of the few problems with Ixquick, I should
probably show a few problems with the popular DuckDuckGo.
Rather than fully proprietary like Ixquick, DuckDuckGo is partly proprietary,
and has released most of their source code via github. However, due to the
parts that they haven't released, it is still impossible to know whether they
do or not track you.
You can read on that here:
http://help.dukgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216390-open-source
DuckDuckGo is also a service based in America, rather than Ixquick which is
based in the Netherlands. This means that they can be compromised by the
government to hand over any logs they might have, which could potentially
identify the users. However, like Ixquick, it ultimately depends on how much
you trust their services, and should just be something to consider.
