@tio@venera.social every request you make in a browser sends your IP address and user agent to the site you made a request to so that's not unusual. The main thing is what does the site do with the data and from my knowledge DDG doesn't do anything dodgy.

I'm part of an open source project and a fairly popular one and I can guarantee you that making it work with donations from users so you can work on it full time is pretty much impossible. 99% need corporations/governments to fund them