Whatever this product is I feel the name is already a hindrance. Normal products don't have privacy in the name. Rightly or wrongly you will be judged when you say 'btw I use ... Privacy...'.<p>The product should have strong privacy built into it and a commitment from the owners to keep it this way. Calling it something mundane and then competing on the merits of the product will favor mass adoption.<p>How many users of WhatsApp really understand the implications of E2E? Would they have installed it if it was call 'Chat App Privacy Pro'?
> No need to install a separate VPN app. Once you sign up for Privacy Pro, you can install our VPN right in your DuckDuckGo browser<p>> we use the open-source WireGuard protocol<p>Any info on how that is implemented?<p>Did they build some plug-in, where a user can enter VPN details/credentials?<p>Asking since I'd love to have something, where I can add my own self-hosted VPN details to have <i>browser only</i> (not the whole machine) connected through VPN.
<i>> And we have a strict no-logging policy; we don’t log or store data that can connect you to your online activity, or to any other DuckDuckGo services, such as search.</i><p>These days the bar for privacy should be higher than "we don't log your activity, trust us." We should aim higher than VPNs.<p>I've been enjoying iCloud Private Relay. Basically it's a type of onion routing. From a privacy perspective, it narrows your leap of faith to "trust that the system is architected the way we say it is and there's no out-of-band collusion among the relays." With that, the entry node (Apple) shouldn't be able to see your destination and the exit node (Apple partner) shouldn't be able to see your IP.<p>Fun fact: it breaks Google search for me and forced me to switch to DDG! I got a captcha almost all the time. In a way, I see that as a positive sign that it's really working to protect privacy.
I didn't even realize DDG had a browser. I've been using Brave for a few years now which has also offered a built-in VPN (which I don't use). If anyone has chose DDG over Brave, what were the deciding factors?
In my experience, personal info removal is a scam. I haven't used DDG specifically, but other services I tried just send you a list of companies you still have to contact yourself.
There is really very little upside to this service. If one wants a plain old wireguard VPN you should just use Mullvad. It's cheaper and has more geographic reach.<p>But using a VPN for privacy is a bad idea in the first place. At least Apple and Vivaldi get that and have moved to two party privacy designs.
What is the use case of a VPN?<p>To hide the IPs of the servers you are visiting from your internet provider?<p>With a VPN, the VPN provider sees those IPs. How is that better?<p>And why would I care that my internet provider sees those IPs in the first place?
Is odd to me that this company choose to use the domain spreadprivacy.com to promote his products. Not the best branding approach to gain naming recognition and trust.
It’s still just censored AF Bing underneath - DDG doesn’t have its own index. Just use Brave Search (which _does_ have its own index) and in 1% of the cases it doesn’t do the trick, go to Google.
Their browser is not available for Linux. I strongly contend that a company that has privacy products, but shows no awareness of Linux, is not one that takes privacy seriously.