Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are there really DDG ads on billboards and NPR? That’s cool.
There are ads on billboards here in Sweden.
I amazingly saw one in Las Vegas recently
DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers
301–310 of 531 posts
Re: DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers
#302Re: DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers
#303DuckDuckGo staff here. As mentioned in the linked page, the purpose of the request is to retrieve a website's favicon so that it can be displayed in certain places within the app or on the results page. We use an internal favicon service because it can be complicated to locate a favicon for a website. They can be stored in a variety of locations and in a variety of formats. The service understands these edge cases an…
> We use an internal favicon service because it can be complicated to locate a favicon for a website
That must be the worst justification for this possible. Favicons. Complicated to locate? Who are you trying to fool, 5 year olds?
Re: DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
In fact I think what they do here is illegal by GDPR. It does not matter that they say they do not collect the information, it is enough it is unnecessarily sent to their servers to make the whole function illegal. The transmission of ip address alone, which is necessary for the TCP request to happen, deanonymizes the request enough to not be considered anonymous within the GDPR framework. GDPR Article 5 (1) c: "Pers…
Wait what? a TCP request already breaks the GDPR rules? Didn't know that... Any human readable ways of dealing with that?
That's not what the parent said. The TCP request includes info that deanonimizes the request.
Or put another way, a TCP request sent by your app from my computer can not be considered anonymous.
Re: DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers
#305DuckDuckGo staff here. As mentioned in the linked page, the purpose of the request is to retrieve a website's favicon so that it can be displayed in certain places within the app or on the results page. We use an internal favicon service because it can be complicated to locate a favicon for a website. They can be stored in a variety of locations and in a variety of formats. The service understands these edge cases an…
I'm surprised at how you're handling this. DDG is supposed to be friendly to privacy-aware users. You're dismissing people's valid points and asking them to trust you, just like any other privacy-non-friendly service would do. Edit: I'm speculating here. But specifically because of the way you've replied here and on Github, my actual level of trust in DDG team went down.
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Re: DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how many lines of code from big open source applications are generic enough to be reused in other projects. Firefox and Google Chrome probably have the equivalent of many small high quality libraries embedded in them, implementing 'business' logic or protocols, that could be reused in more places. I guess a large scale study on github could be done, with a graph analysis to show potential "cut off" points in…
Yeah... the gesture is nice, but good luck extracting any code from a massive project. Might as well say “Here’s some free oil; all you have to do is dig for it.” Unlike oil, this might not be worth the excavation. It’s a bit telling that they linked to the GitHub repositories rather than specific lines of code they were talking about.
Yeah, let's violate privacy instead.
Re: DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
This doesn’t make sense for a browser: just embed the service’s logic in the browser, the browser has all the same information the service could get.
We had already had created this anonymous favicon service for our private search engine. In addition, doing it this way avoids another request (and potentially multiple) to the end site. The service is private as we do not collect any personal information (e.g. IP addresses) on any requests for this or any service and the requests are all end-to-end encrypted.
> We had already had created this anonymous favicon service for our private search engine.
I don't think here's a need for adjectives here. Why stress that it's anonymous (when that's hard to verify) or that the search engine is private, when that too is starting to come into question? Repeating these things won't will them into the reader's perception.
> In addition, doing it this way avoids another request (and potentially multiple) to the end site.
This isn't true, unless I'm missing something here? When I access a website, the HTML response I get from that website includes all the information my browser needs to, on its own, get and display the favicon. Can you clarify why you think/say this avoids one or more requests? What mechanism is this service a substitute for?
Re: DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers
#308I don't want to have to trust everything follows a policy.
It's much easier if I don't even have to trust you. Please change this.
Re: DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can users turn this off?
https://duckduckgo.com/settings#appearance Uncheck the very last option "Site Icons"
What advantage does this give you? DDG just gave you a list of URLs, so how can it be "tracking" the results it just presented to you?
The issue, as I understand it, is that the Android app loads the favicon service for search results you actually open in the app.
Re: DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers
#310DuckDuckGo staff here. As mentioned in the linked page, the purpose of the request is to retrieve a website's favicon so that it can be displayed in certain places within the app or on the results page. We use an internal favicon service because it can be complicated to locate a favicon for a website. They can be stored in a variety of locations and in a variety of formats. The service understands these edge cases an…
It’s amazing how tone deaf technologists can be when it comes to privacy, even when they have nothing to gain by exploiting the user’s data. DDG’s response reminds me of Mark Shuttleworth’s argument that they “have root”, so we can trust them with our life.
Dear DDG, you are getting complaints on GitHub and Hacker News. This is not the general public, it’s people who understand the issue. You should definitely reconsider whether you’re doing something wrong.