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DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers

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Re: DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers

#311

Post by jan_Inkepa »

antpls wrote: post #230
st3fan wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take the code from Firefox iOS or Android-components. We spent a lot of time on these and it is all on device. https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/android-components https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/Firefox-iOS

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…

One issue is that if a bunch of code of a similar theme can be broken off, many times it will be (depending on the culture of the software team). Is looking at the source code of a big project with a hundred dependencies that were all libraries spun off to support the project different to looking at a project where people tried to keep everything monolithic (where you’d expect better re-use potential per line-of-code?)

Re: DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers

#312

Post by jan_Inkepa »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #278
antpls wrote: post #230

Earlier 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.

Looking at the iOS project linked, https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/blob/76faae8c6... , other than being written swift, it looks pretty self-contained/ok?

Re: DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers

#313

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

There's an interesting disease showing up here in the responses.

I accept DDG's statement that this is about a favicon and that they "do not collect or share any personal information", and despite that, I also agree with others that DDG should be on the safe side and just stop doing this small thing. It's just the safer and more moral thing to do (So DDG, as many are suggesting, plz stop doing it. Today is good).

But... the reaction here is "they made a mistake, let's pile on like kids in a playground" ignoring the genuinely huger issue of the amount of info and mining that google et al. do. There's no measure of proportion in the responses, someone is making a mistake then there's a wolfish, pack-like desire to get stuck in and hurt someone.

Which is why politicians rarely admit mistakes, because it's taken as a sign of weakness, not strength, to admit you were wrong. DDG isn't the big evil on the web but from reading some of these you'd think it was the 2nd google.

This isn't about DDG, just the proportionality of responses in public errors and what society you'd like to have.

(no affiliation to DDG)

Re: DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers

#314

Post by _hl_ »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #278
antpls wrote: post #230

Earlier 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.

Here's their kotlin implemenation, looks fairly straightforward/self-contained: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/android-components/tree/ma...

Re: DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers

#317

Post by [deleted] »

smolder wrote: post #258
austhrow743 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An ex DuckDuckGo employee recommending people use an alternative browser over the DuckDuckGo browser, in a post about the DuckDuckGo browser spying on its users, is about as on topic as you can get; after the current employee giving an explanation.

They said "worked with" duckduckgo. I'm not clear on what that means. I think they'd have said "worked for" if it was direct employment.

[deleted]

Re: DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers

#318

Post by jhasse »

bad_user wrote: post #215
zeckalpha wrote: post #188

Seems a bit much, but k-anonymity could work here. Hash the domain, take the prefix, get a batch of favicons back. They won’t know which you visited, but still get the benefits of consistent favicon support.

And how would they get the "batch of favicons" in the first place?

When there's a miss, send the domain to the server so that it can fill the cache. You probably won't even have to do that as DDG could have already filled the cache with their search results.

Re: DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers

#319

Post by warpspin »

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #313

There's an interesting disease showing up here in the responses. I accept DDG's statement that this is about a favicon and that they "do not collect or share any personal information", and despite that, I also agree with others that DDG should be on the safe side and just stop doing this small thing. It's just the safer and more moral thing to do (So DDG, as many are suggesting, plz stop doing it. Today is good). But…

I think what angered people was actually that a company saying to hold privacy high was simply refusing to change something after a mistake was pointed out and instead kept on defending it with a technical argument, which makes no sense at all.

The reaction would have been actually a lot different if someone from the company admitted the mistake and promised it will be changed.

Update: Gabriel Weinberg has promised to change it, linking it here so it does not get buried in the pile of comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23711597

Re: DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers

#320

Post by scoutt »

tagawa wrote: post #52

DuckDuckGo 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…

This answer and other replies from yourself in this page seem copypasted from here: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/fa...

why?

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