> Are you thinking that every employee of DuckDuckGo that knows this (and many would have to), is paid so highly as to just be quiet?
I'm not thinking that DDG is secretly being run by Google at all, but I'm forced to admit that there's nothing stopping Google from doing it, that they have the money and resources to do it, and that it would benefit them to do it, so however remote, it is a possibility that should be considered right along side the possibility that duckduckgo is exactly what they say they are and nothing more. We have no evidence of either being true after all and can only speculate.
If we're asking ourselves that the risks of using DDG are, we have to at least consider what the worst case scenarios might be.
So while I consider the possibility that DDG is being run by google to be possible, but highly unlikely, just as a thought experiment, why would anyone but a very small number of Google employees working at DDG need to know it was run by google and sending data back home? Any other DDG employees don't need to be told. If google employees ran the servers, DDG employees would be free to work on the front end and day to day stuff entirely unaware.
> The problem with this (and most other conspiratorial thinking) is that of course a whistleblower is going to come forward.
This is not a guarantee at all. Edward Snowden came forward, but only after many many years and not one of his co-workers in the same role did. DuPont knowingly poisoned people for decades and not a single whistleblower ever came forward. Johnson & Johnson knew that their product (which we were covering infants with) caused cancer but there was no whistleblower to break the story to the public.
Over and over and over again we only learn about horrific acts committed against the public by corporations after decades of gathering scientific data and court actions specifically because people were "paid so highly as to just be quiet". It's a fact that whistleblowers are the rare exception and not the rule.
The idea that companies are so afraid of whistleblowers or their reputation that they wouldn't do evil things is demonstrably false as we've seen example after example of companies who knowingly put profit over human life time and time again and even when there were whistleblowers the companies often faced zero meaningful consequences beyond paying back a small percentage of the profits they made while building a body count.
Whistleblowers are awesome, and they remain a very import check against bad actors, but do not count on them always being there to save you and don't expect that fear of them will prevent a company from committing acts far far worse than logging your internet searches.