Libs on this platform are obsessed with the trolley problem. They referred to it a lot to prove that genocide is ok and it being a deal breaker is stupid.

I can only hope they encrypted them properly at some point

Encryption is reversible, hashing isn’t. That’s why you use the latter for passwords.

You could give SearXNG a try. It’s open source, you can host it yourself, and it has no ads or tracking. Most other search engines (including DuckDuckGo) make their income from ads, that alone makes them untrustworthy in my book. I’m using https://searxng.online/ and it works good enough.