DuckDuckGo claims it doesn’t track its users. That claim may be true, because it appears they very cleverly permit someone else to do it:
“DuckDuckGo talks about their privacy, right, saying that they’re a private search engine,” Granville explained, “and if anybody had 6th grade developer tools, they can go into DuckDuckGo and they will see tracking cookies” in the site’s source code.
DuckDuckGo, however, claims it does not track its users. This seems suspect to Granville who wonders just who is getting all the data from the tracking cookies in DuckDuckGo’s website.
“What I can tell is they have targeted advertising, and they have two cookies on their site — somebody is tracking you,” Granville noted. “DuckDuckGo may not be tracking you on their servers — which I find hard to believe — but, certainly they are handing that information off to the two other cookies. And who knows what those other companies are doing — which I suspect is Google — and who Google is selling that information to on down the line.”
Shades of the system in which the individual’s country doesn’t spy on him, the other countries do, then they all trade the information so that all the governments get the data on their citizenries without violating national laws about spying on citizens.