DuckDuckGo May Have Adopted Woke Policies if This Job Application is to be Believed
If you have switched from using Google or some other Big Tech search engine to DuckDuckGo, maybe think about switching to another search engine like Brave. DDG may very well be woke (among other things) and here’s why.
A story coming from a person known only as “Chris” on his paperwork and “anonymous” elsewhere shows that DuckDuckGo apparently doesn’t want to hire you if you’re a straight, white male and will easily hire you without experience if you belong to a group they deem acceptable.
Chris seems to have all the experience as a mobile developer that a company could ask for, as can be seen in the slideshow below. You can find his resume, answers to the application questions and DuckDuckGo’s follow-up in the slideshow. After those documents, you’ll find Chris’s fake resume and documents where he reapplies as a person of color named Aliyah Imani. The fake application’s subtitle was changed from ‘mobile developer’ to ‘pride & diversity’ and includes many grammar errors, less experience and even says they may be in the US illegally.
In the end, Chris was denied with very little feedback and the fake application made it to the second round with a lot of feedback and promise. Read through the documents yourself.
If this wasn’t enough for you to switch search engines, here’s a list of some other issues with DuckDuckGo (or DDG).
- DuckDuckGo’s founder (Gabriel Weinberg) has a history of privacy abuse, starting with his founding of Names Database, a surveillance capitalist service designed to coerce naïve users to submit sensitive information about their friends. (2006)
- Weinberg’s motivation for creating DucDuckGo was not actually to “spread privacy”; it was to create something big, something that would compete with big players. As a privacy abuser during the conception of DDG (Names Database), Weinberg sought to become a big-name legacy. Privacy is Weinberg’s means (not ends) in that endeavor. Clearly he doesn’t value privacy – he values perception of privacy.
- DuckDuckGo was caught violating its own privacy policy by issuing tracker cookies.
- DuckDuckGo’s app sends every URL you visit to DDG servers. (reaction).
- DuckDuckGo is currently collecting users’ operating systems and everything they highlight in the search results. (to verify this, simply hit F12 in your browser and select the “network” tab. Do a search with JavaScript enabled. Highlight some text on the screen. Mouseover the traffic rows and see that your highlighted text, operating system, and other details relating to geolocation are sent to DDG. Then change the query and submit. Notice that the previous query is being transmitted with the new query to link the queries together)
- DuckDuckGo is accused of fingerprinting users’ browsers.
- When clicking an ad on the DuckDuckGo results page, all data available in your session is sent to the advertiser, which is why the Epic browser project refuses to set DDG as the default browser.
- DuckDuckGo blacklisted Framabee, a search engine for the highly respected framasoft.org consortium.
- Some people replace Google with DuckDuckGo in order to avoid censorship. DDG is not the answer.
- DuckDuckGo is complying with the “celebrity threesome injunction”.
- DuckDuckGo promotes one of the largest privacy abusing tech giants and adversary to the Tor community: CloudFlare Inc. DDG results give high rankings to CloudFlare sites, which consequently compromises privacy, net neutrality, and anonymity:
- Anonymity: CloudFlare DoS attacks Tor users, causing substantial damage to the Tor network.
- Privacy: All CloudFlare sites are surreptitiously MitM’d by design.
- Net neutrality: CloudFlare’s attack on Tor users causes access inequality, the centerpiece to net neutrality.
- DuckDuckGo T-shirts are sold using a CloudFlare site, thus surreptitiously sharing all order information (name, address, credit card, etc.) with CloudFlare despite their statement at the bottom of the page saying “DuckDuckGo is an Internet privacy company that empowers you to seamlessly take control of your personal information online, without any tradeoffs.” (2019)
- DuckDuckGo hired CloudFlare to host spreadprivacy.com (2019)
- DuckDuckGo patronizes privacy-abuser Amazon, using AWS for hosting.
- Amazon is making an astronomical investment in facial recognition which will destroy physical travel privacy
worldwide. - Amazon uses Ring and Alexa to surveil neighborhoods and the inside of homes.
- Amazon paid $195k to fight privacy in CA. (also see https://cal-access.sos.ca.gov/Campaign/Committees/Detail.aspx?id=1401518&view=late1)
- Amazon runs sweat shops, invests in climate denial, etc.
- Amazon is making an astronomical investment in facial recognition which will destroy physical travel privacy
- DuckDuckGo feeds privacy-abuser Microsoft by patronizing the Bing API for search results and uses Outlook email service.
- Microsoft Office products violate the GDPR (the Dutch government discovered numerous violations)
- Microsoft finances AnyVision to equip the Israeli military with facial recognition to be used against the Palestinians who they oppress.
- Microsoft paid $195k to fight privacy in CA. (also see https://cal-access.sos.ca.gov/Campaign/Committees/Detail.aspx?id=1401518&view=late1)
- DuckDuckGo hires Microsoft for email service:
torsocks dig @8.8.8.8 mx duckduckgo.com +tcp | grep -E '^\w'==> “…duckduckgo-com.mail.protection.outlook.com”
- DuckDuckGo is partnered with Yahoo (aka Oath; plus Verizon and AOL by extension). DDG helps Yahoo profit by patronizing Yahoo’s API for search results, and also through advertising. The Verizon corporate conglomerate is evil in many ways:
- Yahoo, Verizon, and AOL all supported CISPA (unwarranted surveillance bills)
- Yahoo, Verizon, and AOL all use DNSBLs to block individuals from running their own mail servers, thus forcing an over-share of e-mail metadata with a relay.
- Verizon and AOL both drug test their employees, thus intruding on their privacy outside of the workplace.
- Verizon supports the TTP treaty.
- Yahoo voluntarily ratted out a human rights journalist (Shi Tao) to the Chinese government without warrant, leading to his incarceration.
- Yahoo recently recovered “deleted” e-mail to convict a criminal. The deleted e-mail was not expected to be recoverable per the Yahoo Privacy Policy.
- Verizon received $16.8 billion in Trump tax breaks, then immediately laid off thousands of workers.
- (2014) Verizon fined $7.4 million for violating customers’ privacy.
- (2016) Yahoo caught surreptitiously monitoring Yahoo Mail messages for the NSA.
- (2016) Verizon fined $1.35 million for violating customers’ privacy.
- (2018) Verizon paid $200k to fight privacy in CA. See also this page.
- (2018) Verizon caught taking voice prints?
- More dirt (scroll down to Verizon).
- DuckDuckGo secured a room at FOSDEM 2018 to deliver a sales pitch despite its proprietary non-free server code, then dashed out without taking questions. Shame on FOSDEM organizers for allowing this corrupt abuse of precious resources.
- Tor Project accepted a $25k “contribution” (read: bribe) from DuckDuckGo, so you’ll find that DDG problems are down-played. This is why Tor Browser defaults to using DuckDuckGo and why Tor Project endorses DDG over searxes.eu.org – and against the interests of the privacy-seeking Tor community. The Electronic Frontier Foundation also pushes DuckDuckGo which is a likely consequence of EFF’s close ties to Tor Project.
On top of all this, you can see the CEO and executives range from slightly left to far left just by checking what they post or react to on social media.
- Gabriel Weinberg, CEO
- Doesn’t tweet often about politics, but has retweeted this article in support of bailing out BLM and Antifa rioters.
- Little concern seems to be given over censorship or manipulation, but likes to throw around the word “privacy” a lot. It’s mostly marketing as we know from the previous information that DuckDuckGo isn’t as about privacy as they like to say they are.
- Looks to be center-left.
- Russell Holt, Vice President
- Twitter profile: https://twitter.com/__russell__
- Plenty of tweets and retweets praising “refugees”‘ and Vindman.
- He likes to denounce those who question the validity of the 2020 election.
- Fairly far left if not very far left is my guestimate.
- Kamyl Bazbaz, Communications
- LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kamylbazbaz/
- Previous advisor to Hillary Clinton’s press secretary
- Jaryd Malbin, Director
- LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jarydmalbin/
- Loves hitting the like button on the typical racial, SJW topics on LinkedIn.
These are short and quick points we’ve found on this company and some of its executives. This looks like DuckDuckGo DuckDuckWoke is delving pretty deep into the world of “woke” culture if you ask me. This seems like it’s more than just a single HR employee affecting their hiring process. It’s also very telling that their “woke” policies aren’t the only issues with the company, but so are their past privacy and civil liberty problems.
This information also leads into another problem surrounding “misinformation.” Since DuckDuckGo looks to be a mostly leftist business, they will follow in the footsteps of Big Tech and curate search results THEY deem to be “correct” information. After all, their original reason for their founding was simply to be “another option” to Google. They never started off as being anything more private. That was something they would later use as a marketing tool.
It’s time to realize DuckDuckGo is on the same side as Big Tech. It’s time to say #DuckDuckBye.
Note: We have reached out to the CEO of DuckDuckGo for comment, and will update this story if he replies.
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