DuckDuckGo SafeSearch Easily Bypassed

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  • cj109
    January 23, 2020 at 1:48 am

    Hi,

    I was able to easily turn off safe search for DuckDuckGo. Any ideas on how to fix this?

    omcblecenc
    January 25, 2020 at 9:40 am

    Same for me. I am using the family filter and I face the same issue. Even NSFW images are displayed correctly.

    On these search engines also, Safesearch is not forced but images and videos are not shown : Qwant, Yahoo, Ecosia and AOL.

    The only search engines that seems to have Safesearch enforced correctly are Google, Bing, Yandex and Swisscows.

    Daniel Cid
    January 30, 2020 at 12:55 am

    Something is off. I just tried DuckDuckGo and it is properly protected (we enforce their Safe Search mode) on both the Adult and Family filters.

    As far as the other search engines, we actually block the image search on the Family Filter. Can you confirm you are using it?

    thanks,

    omcblecenc
    February 1, 2020 at 9:17 am

    Thanks for your great work and for your reply.

    It’s odd, SafeSearch is now correctly enforced on DuckDuckGo without me doing anything. I set the Family Filter on my router and I remember DuckDuckGo having SafeSearch enforced first, but when I wrote my message, it wasn’t the case while it was still enforced on Google, Youtube and Bing. If that ever happens again, I will run a DNS leak test to see if everything is normal.

    For the other search engines, as I said, images and videos are not displayed, which is fine. It would have been great if web search was safe too, but I understand that it’s not always possible to enforce it. I found a better solution for Qwant : you can add a CNAME for api.qwant.com that points to safeapi.qwant.com. It also enforces a strict filter on image and video results, thus making the blocking the search unnecessary.

    cj109
    February 4, 2020 at 12:00 am

    Same here. It wasn’t working before but it seems to be working fine now. No inappropriate images are showing on DuckDuckGo and it doesn’t matter if the SafeSearch is turned off. Thanks for your help!

    Daniel Cid
    February 4, 2020 at 9:02 pm

    Awesome! I wonder if that was a bug on their DNS API that they resolved.

    Glad it is fixed.

    CelestialMetroid
    October 15, 2020 at 8:13 pm

    I am having this same issue now. Google is locked down to safe-search but DuckDuckGo is not. the rest of the filter works fine and wont go into any sites but it does display NSFW images.

    A.
    October 19, 2020 at 8:57 pm

    Maybe they changed something and fixed it again. I’m using the family f., and I get: “Images blocked by safe search.”

    CelestialMetroid
    October 23, 2020 at 9:24 am

    It seems to work sometimes but not others… Its very inconsistent and I’m not sure why. Right now I am able to change the filter settings but all the other search engines work as expected.
    I have some screenshots but I cant figure out how to upload them here.