I just got a brand new domain for something. I opened the domain on duckduckgo browser on android, I saw two hits on my webserver. One for the page and one for the favicon, all good till this point.

After I while, and while I opened the tabs page on the browser to close this tab, I noticed one more hit on my webserver:

'User-agent' => 'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DuckDuckGo-Favicons-Bot/1.0; http://duckduckgo.com)'

'REMOTE_ADDR' => '54.208.102.37'

It is requesting the "/" page of my domain.

The remote IP belongs to Amazon's EC2: https://whatismyipaddress.com/ip/54.208.102.37

I tried again with two more subdomains under my domain. Same result, seconds after opening the tabs page on the browser, one more request by this DuckDuckGo bot.

For one of these subdomains I tried to write the whole URL, including the http:// part to make sure that it is not interpreting my URL as a search query somehow and thus going through DDG (which would still be bad practive for a privacy focused browser) but even with a proper full URL, the bot hit my domain.

I really want to be mistaken here but if I am not, why the hell is DDG browser calling home and giving out the domains I visit to DDG??? I've been already betrayed in similar ways by other major browsers on Android, please tell me that I am wrong and that DDG is not calling home.

BTW I just tried it once more and it seems to be repeatable, it happens every time. This time the request came from 107.21.1.8 though.