Apple held talks with DuckDuckGo to replace Alphabet's Google as the default search engine for the private mode on Apple's Safari browser, the Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the discussions.
If the goodwill they garner from that makes APPL go up because it matches the privacy expectation they are branding themselves with, they might be making even more money anyway.
Partially, but also partially it's legit. I generally don't have much positive to say about Apple, but they make pretty things and the privacy is generally better than most.
Audited for what telemetry is transmitted from an iPhone or Mac during use, what information is possible to harvest by a third party app, and whether or not purpose-made experimental data is made available to advertisers.
It looks like no official (that is, authorized by Apple) audits have been done, at least that I can see. But privacy research firms have done it, and the consensus appears to be that Apple is not great, but better than Google, Amazon, and Facebook. For what it's worth.
Could be that Apple will acquire DuckDuckGo.
A little hasty to presume it I suppose, but Apple has to wonder how much money they are leaving on the table by taking Google’s payments. If Google will pay them more than $9 billion/year just to be default—what does that say about how profitable Apple’s absolutely huge and locked-in base can be?
Edit: I googled it. There is no source, basically just a guy claiming that would be logical for them to do but his timeframe is already proven wrong and Apple hasn’t announced anything.