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by yegg 1531 days ago
DuckDuckGo for Mac (the subject of this post) does not use privacy grades of any kind. We will be moving away for them on all platforms soon, and they were never used for search rankings, just for transparency. On using our app more generally, please see my comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31002089

As to what is going on with privacy grades more generally, we never felt comfortable rating a site an A if we couldn't assess their privacy policy, since they could be doing very nefarious things (e.g., selling your data). We tried to work with groups to get more assessments on more sites, but never found a scalable way to do this. We even licensed various ML analysis algorithms for privacy policies, but always found significant issues with them. In the end, I think this stems from the fact that privacy policies themselves are too vague.

1 comments

I agree that privacy grades are misleading, they could be replaced by the number of trackers blocked.