Trackers lurk nearly everywhere online, trying to scoop up your search history, browsing history, location history, and more. Even everyday online activities like purchasing groceries or looking up the local weather can result in dozens of companies tracking you.
Other companies track your data - like your search, chat, and browsing history - to create detailed profiles about you, and then use those profiles to follow you around with ads so creepy it can seem like your devices are listening in on you (even when they aren't). These profiles are also used by companies to influence what you see online, which can lead to manipulation and discrimination. That's why we offer an all-in-one privacy product as a privacy preserving alternative to products like Google Search, Google Gemini, and Google Chrome, to help protect your everyday online activities.
We don't track you. That's our Privacy Policy in a nutshell.
We don't save or share your search, chat, or browsing history when you search on DuckDuckGo, chat on Duck.ai, or use our apps and extensions.
When you visit our search engine or our other websites, your device sends some information about itself automatically, like its IP address, browser type, and language, and may send additional information upon request like its screen size, operating system, and preferences. However, we only use this information temporarily to deliver content to you and, for security, to ensure you're not a malicious bot. Similarly, we may also anonymously use information we receive from you when using our products and features, such as click timing in Email Protection, for security, and to protect against fraud and abuse. We don't save your IP address alongside your searches, Duck.ai chats, or visits to our websites, and we never log IP addresses to disk that could be tied back to you. We also don't save any other unique identifiers alongside your searches, chats, or visits to our website, and never log unique identifiers to disk that could be tied back to you or to your search, chat, or browsing history. If you enable optional features (more on those below), such as storing chats in encrypted form on our servers with Sync & Backup, we may use random IDs so those features can work, but the master decryption key exists only on your synced devices, meaning DuckDuckGo cannot decrypt and read your chats in any case.
This means that when you use our services, we have no way to create a history of your search queries, your chats, or the sites you browse. For example, we may know that we got a lot of searches for " cute cat pictures " today, but we don't know who actually performed those searches. That is, viewing search results on DuckDuckGo is anonymous. And we only save these anonymous search queries - completely disconnected from any unique identifiers like IP addresses - to improve our search indexes by analyzing anonymous search trends, so that we can better serve you. For local search results in particular, we've further engineered a solution to shield your precise location from us and our content providers that sends us a random location nearish to you, which we also never log to disk.
In the process of delivering and improving our search results and other content, we also prevent our hosting and content providers from creating a history of your searches, chats, and browsing. At a technical level, we achieve this by calling for content (for example, images) on your behalf from our servers and then ensuring that content is securely delivered to you through an end-to-end encrypted connection. In order for our product to function (for example, for security and display purposes), we share anonymous information (for example, browser and device types) with our hosting and content providers, but we never share any information with them that could tie your searches, chats, or website visits to you personally, or that could allow them to create a history of your individual search queries, chats, or the sites you browse.