I just assumed ddg would be the lesser, but I use it for privacy. Turns out I'm wrong.

If you're using DDG for privacy, then indeed you are wrong.

It may be "less invasive" than google, but it's neither anonymous, nor private.

Here's a bunch more reasons from techrights.org, a site dedicated to digital freedom and exposing corruption.

Direct privacy abuse:

DDG was caught violating its own privacy policy by issuing tracker cookies.

DDG’s app sends every URL you visit to DDG servers. (reaction).

DDG is currently collecting users’ operating systems and everything they highlight in the search results. (to verify this, simply hit F12 in your browser and select the “network” tab. Do a search with javascript enabled. Highlight some text on the screen. Mouseover the traffic rows and see that your highlighted text, operating system, and other details relating to geolocation are sent to DDG. Then change the query and submit. Notice that the previous query is being transmitted with the new query to link the queries together)

DDG is accused of fingerprinting users’ browsers.

When clicking an ad on the DDG results page, all data available in your session is sent to the advertiser, which is why the Epic browser project refuses to set DDG as the default browser.

DDG blacklisted Framabee, a search engine for the highly respected framasoft.org consortium."

CloudFlare:

DDG promotes one of the largest privacy abusing tech giants and adversary to the Tor community: CloudFlare Inc. DDG results give high rankings to CloudFlare sites, which consequently compromises privacy, net neutrality, and anonymity.

Full article: http://techrights.org/2020/07/02/ddg-privacy-abuser-in-disguise/

ETA: The bulk of the text in my reply was lifted from a reddit comment. I tried to format my comment to reflect that it's a "quote", alas I've failed. Hence this.

Also, I don't have a card in this game. I understand anonymity and privacy - I dislike intentional deception.