At DuckDuckGo we believe in privacy–this belief is in everything we do. Also, like many tech companies, we solve hard problems. Over the years we’ve developed some pretty interesting technologies and strategies to solve these hard problems while keeping our users’ privacy intact. We are proof that you can run a successful organization and raise the standard of trust online.
One of the ways we protect our users is to use NGiNX to proxy all external content on our site. In order to manage and troubleshoot this functionality, without logging any user information, we’ve had to patch NGiNX. We’d like to share those patches and how we use them. In addition with our privacy apps and browser extensions, we upgrade user connections to use SSL based on an extensive upgrade list that we maintain. Finally, we continually improve our site using techniques to anonymously A/B test various changes.
We want to share these techniques, code, and data with the world in the hopes that people will start using and improving them.