What you're agreeing to
DuckDuckGo's Terms of Service are refreshingly short because there is almost nothing to agree to. No account is required, no content license exists, and there is no arbitration clause. The only restrictions are the obvious ones: don't use it for illegal activity and don't scrape it at scale.
Privacy in plain English
DuckDuckGo does not know who you are, and by design, it never will. No search history is stored, no profile is built, and no data is sold to advertisers. Every search you run is treated as if it's the very first one you've ever made, because as far as DuckDuckGo is concerned, it is.
Terms of Service: Breakdown
There are no concerning clauses to report because the terms do not grant DuckDuckGo any rights over your behavior or content. No content license (you don't post content). No arbitration clause (there's nothing to dispute). No account termination (there's no account). The only notable section is a standard prohibition against using the service to attack DuckDuckGo's own infrastructure. Third-party sharing: DuckDuckGo syndicates results from Bing, which means anonymized query terms are sent to Microsoft, but with no user identifiers attached. A real-world scenario: you search for something embarrassing. DuckDuckGo processes the query, returns results, and immediately forgets it happened. Privacy advocate verdict: this is what every search engine could look like if the business model didn't depend on harvesting your attention.
Privacy Policy: Breakdown
This means that if someone hacked DuckDuckGo's servers tomorrow, they would find nothing linking any search to any person. No red flags were identified in this policy. The document is short precisely because the data practices are minimal: there is nothing to hide and nothing to explain away. Third-party note: the browser extension and mobile app include tracker-blocking features that actively prevent other companies from profiling you across the web. Third-party sharing: none for advertising. Privacy advocate verdict: use this as your default search engine. The search quality is comparable to Google for most queries and the privacy trade-off is zero.
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