[freebeard]

It gets complicated

REUTERS Fact Check-No deal between DuckDuckGo and Microsoft to track users online

Mitrano added that DuckDuckGo is, for the most part, regarded as keeping its promise in not profiling users, and is distinguished from Google and Bing for not collecting user information to sell ads.

“Yes, (DuckDuckGo makes) its money on selling advertisements,” she said. “But it doesn’t do that individual profiling. So it’s not running those scripts to get all that information about the individual.”

VERDICT
Missing context. Users are sharing an outdated story without the context that DuckDuckGo has eliminated a gap in its tracker-blocking feature that previously allowed some Microsoft tracking scripts on third-party websites to load.

The Register doesn't shy away from the gory details:

Brave roasts DuckDuckGo over Bing privacy exception

Search biz hits back at 'misleading' claims, saga lifts lid on Microsoft's web tracking advice
....
"Trackers try to get around cookie blocking by appending identifiers to URL query parameters, to ID you across sites," he explained.

DuckDuckGo is aware of this, Eich said, because its browser prevents Google, Facebook, and others from appending identifiers to URLs in order to bypass third-party cookie blocking.

"[DuckDuckGo] removes Google’s 'gclid' and Facebook’s 'fbclid'," Eich said. "Test it yourself by visiting https://example.org/?fbclid=sample in [DuckDuckGo]’s macOS browser. The 'fbclid' value is removed."

"However, [DuckDuckGo] does not apply this protection to Microsoft’s 'msclkid' query parameter," Eich continued. "[Microsoft's] documentation specifies that 'msclkid' exists to circumvent third-party cookie protections in browsers (including in Safari’s browser engine used by DDG on Apple OSes)."