Once people have gone down the avenue of earnestly reporting private information leakage, the correct answer is to investigate. DDG decided not to do this and instead dismissed the problem completely out of hand and ignored it for almost a year without taking any action.
No one asked for an apology, they asked DDG to admit fault and then to fix the problem. ie "we shouldn't have done that" not "we're sorry we did that."
You keep saying "mob" but these people didn't collect to harass, if you actually read all of the comments the vast majority are people who are (rightly!) concerned about their data privacy advocate built software leaking every visited URL.
You’re absolutely ignoring the possibility of an argument where there is no fault and this is being blown out of proportion. You just assume your opinion is correct and they owe you to fix it. That is in itself the problem OP was exposing.
Once people have gone down the avenue of earnestly reporting private information leakage, the correct answer is to investigate. DDG decided not to do this and instead dismissed the problem completely out of hand and ignored it for almost a year without taking any action.
No one asked for an apology, they asked DDG to admit fault and then to fix the problem. ie "we shouldn't have done that" not "we're sorry we did that."
You keep saying "mob" but these people didn't collect to harass, if you actually read all of the comments the vast majority are people who are (rightly!) concerned about their data privacy advocate built software leaking every visited URL.