“Quite misleading”: DuckDuckGo CEO responds to Microsoft tracker controversy

Update: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg took to Twitter on Saturday, calling our headline “quite misleading” since “this isn’t about our search engine and we actually restrict Microsoft scripts in our browsers, including blocking their 3rd party cookies.”

FYI — this is a quite misleading headline since this isn’t about our search engine and we actually restrict Microsoft scripts in our browsers, including blocking their 3rd party cookies. For full context, I left detailed explanation on reddit:https://t.co/AfDSKceldw

— Gabriel Weinberg (@yegg) May 29, 2022

(Article by Tyler Durden republished from ZeroHedge.com)

Weinberg links to a Reddit thread he created on Wednesday when the tracking controversy broke. In it, he explains: “this article is not about our search engine, but about our browsers,” adding that “When most other browsers on the market talk about tracking protection they are usually referring to 3rd-party cookie protection and fingerprinting protection, and our browsers impose these same restrictions on all third-party tracking scripts, including those from Microsoft.”

And while Redditors appeared sympathetic in the replies, users in the more technically oriented YCombinator Hacker News forum weren’t buying it.

The top response refutes Weinberg’s claim that “this is not about search,” explaining; “Your competitors in the privacy-centric browser space don’t have this restriction because they’re not search engines acquiring the majority of their data from an entity with a conflicting interest.”

Another user replied: “The thread by the security engineer shows that the scripts are communicating back to the servers. That means your multi-pronged protection has failed, unless you’ve suddenly discovered a