DuckDuckGo is a privacy-focused search engine of the web. While it's far from Google or Bing, it has indeed garnered a great number of users.
Since 2011, the company have donated $800,000 to projects that work on spreading internet privacy. And in 2018, the search engine is taking it up with the DuckDuckGo Privacy Challenge Crowdfunding Campaign.
Here, participants can donate and spread the words about how important privacy is on the internet.
"We could dramatically increase the amount of money that's donated to these amazing organizations," said DuckDuckGo. "Suggestions for the participating organizations were crowdsourced from you, the DuckDuckGo community, and all of these impactful projects either directly enable you to be more private online, or help defend your rights to online privacy."
In June 5th, 2018, DuckDuck announced that its Privacy Challenge Crowdfunding Campaign had collected a grand total of $642,482. This is all for donations to help advance privacy rights and tools. The company donated $500,000 to 21 privacy organizations that share its vision of raising the standard of trust online.
DuckDuckGo is making one exception as there was an additional $142,482 donated by 2,113 individuals as a part of the campaign.
This initiative started out back in 2011, when DuckDuckGo was still a three-year-old "tiny" search engine company. At that time, it donated $1,500 to nonprofits focusing on internet privacy.
As more people are becoming privacy aware, the number of queries it process increased. The most notable when DuckDuckGo grew 55 percent in 2017, where it experienced 14 million searches a day.
At that time, the privacy-focused search engine awarded $300,000 in donations to 16 nonprofits that tackle issues like user privacy, freedom of speech and civil liberties. The climb was pretty decent from $225,000 in donations made to nine organizations in the year before that.
Freedom of the Press Foundation, World Privacy Forum, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and Tor Project were each awarded donations in the five-to-six-figure range. Others got smaller donations in the four-figure range.
"Our growth puts us in a position to support projects that share our vision of raising the standard of trust online," said CEO Gabriel Weinberg. "People are actively looking for ways to reduce their digital footprint and these donations will support new education initiatives and continued development of privacy tools and services."