Popular Onion Services Fetching Clearnet Sources in the Background

Dear Tor community,

for a while when using popular .onion services, such as DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, NY Times etc, I noticed that they often connect to a variety of clearnet domains in the background, possibly rendering the use of the .onion domain useless. The most popular example of this issue is DuckDuckGo: what’s the point of “onionizing the search” when my Browser connects to links.duckduckgo.com in the background? (screenshot)

On other websites, these domains often are tracker networks or externally embedded content, such as from fonts.googleapis.com

So far, my contact attempts have been ignored.

I believe that the community should reach out to operators of popular .onion services to inform them about their misconfigurations.

Looking forward to your replies!

4 Likes

Hi RP, thanks for the post!

Indeed!