Creating a throwaway account to disparage a particular point of view is also questionable, no?
At what point did we stop taking people's word and commitment as valid? Sure, I too want to see proof that they are doing the right thing here (because I don't understand the design decisions that led to the creation of that service in the first place), but because these changes are not immediate, this statement does at least answer some of the questions I personally had (Like "will this be fixed"? "when"?).
> At what point did we stop taking people's word and commitment as valid?
At the point that they where caught violating privacy while claiming to respect it, and standing to make a profit off of violating it.
If I trusted people as blindly as people seem to trust DuckDuckGo, I would have trusted Google to not be evil and never have switched to DDG in the first place. This breach of trust destroys the whole point of using it, so I switched my default search to Searx between reading this submission and writing this (had been procrastinating the switch for a while and this was exactly the motivation I needed).
I will of course be keeping an eye on whether or not they follow through, but the admission of this being a problem and committing to fix it is -far- more than we see from most companies these days. Is it everything I ever could have wanted out of the company? no. However it is a positive direction I would like to see more of so displaying my appreciation is hopefully validation for the company to continue in that direction.
