DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers • Hacker News Board

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

#361

Post by pelliphant » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 10:10 AM UTC

azalemeth wrote: post #356

pelliphant wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you, this is the response people here want to hear. And if this gets fixed in a reasonable timeframe, this is just one of those "everyone makes a mistake one in a while"-things, no big deal.

If anything, it's much better than 'no big deal'. It's "We made this design decision, thought you would like it -- we've learnt, changed, and will avoid it later". Can you imagine Google doing something similar? Heck, they're just about to throw the Android rooting community under a hardware-attestation DRM-filled bus.

True, it is better

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

#362

Post by baud147258 » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 10:11 AM UTC

bartread wrote: post #345

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…

> 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. Sadly people simply derive satisfaction from piling on like this. The pop psycholo…

Also with the current social media platforms, it's really easy to find and participate in such pile up.

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

#363

Post by Agentlien » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 10:13 AM UTC

niftylettuce wrote: post #84

verandaguy wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree on most points, actually: >Faster, less bloat Stock Firefox doesn't actually have that much bloat, and it's not noticeably slower than Chrome on reasonably modern hardware (i.e.: most page loads are near-instant, same as in Chrome on a good connection). >Extension support for Chromium is way better too Until Google decides that your extension is unworthy of being in their store. This notably happened with Pu…

As I said in other another comment, I'm a power user. And by power user I mean probably 10x the normal standard of what a 10x power user means. Tooling is everything to me; which is why I prefer this over anything else. I'm very biased.

This comment made me smile because it gives me the same absurd vibes as "Impossible Is Nothing".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_Is_Nothing_(video_r...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGMaVC1YVlQ

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

#364

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 10:14 AM UTC

kchoudhu wrote: post #268

jacquesm wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Gabriel know about this? If not could you please clue him in and get some guidance because you are absolutely getting roasted here and are wrecking DDG's carefully built up reputation. I can easily see how this might seem to be a good idea to you and other DDG engineers but it goes 180 degrees against DDG's stated mission. In other words: you may be well outside your paygrade on this.

This is an asshole response.

No, it is the response of someone who was once upon a time CEO of a startup that fortunately did not operate in the present day news cycle where reputations can be destroyed in a couple of hours. DDG is precious, saying things that are very much against what I know to be the founding principles of the company is something that should only be done by those that have been given the proper authority. The response here is candid but ultimately not the one that DDG would and should give. Gabriels' contribution upthread pretty much confirms that. My comment was simply to ensure things would not get worse than they already were until someone in a position of authority at DDG could step in.

All you have to do is to read this comment thread to see the kind of damage that a single statement by someone affiliated with the company can do.

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

#365

Post by chrispauley » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 10:16 AM UTC

yegg wrote: post #340

Hi all, Founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo here. I’m literally just waking up and reading the comments here. I’m new to this issue and happy to commit us to move to doing this locally in the browser and will have us move on that ASAP. That said, I want to be clear that we did not and have not collected any personal information here. As other staff have referenced, our services are encrypted and throw away PII like IP addr…

This response validates my trust in DDG as has happened so many times before. Seriously cool company you've built here.

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

#366

Post by _hl_ » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 10:16 AM UTC

st3fan wrote: post #109

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…

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

It's not immediately obvious whether it is more privacy preserving if the client automatically makes a request to each site in the search results while scrolling through the results, especially since you're already trusting DDG when performing the search.

Maybe this should be an opt-in rather than an opt-out feature?

Edit: as pointed out by warpspin in another comment, this is about the DDG Browser, not search results.

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

#367

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 10:16 AM UTC

sillysaurusx wrote: post #330

raxxorrax wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but chastising an employee is not in the interest of good PR, even if we sadly see that quite often in the days of social media. That is especially true if the employee just honestly laid out the facts, I wouldn't even call that a mistake. I use DDG and the possibility of getting a statement directly from an engineer conveys much more trust than a carefully crafted PR statement ever could. I would think again ab…

It’s your duty as an employee to shut up for your company. I didn’t learn this until later in my career. Fortunately it didn’t have lasting impact. By commenting on an ongoing PR crisis without consulting management, you are both undermining their ability to respond in an effective way — imagine how strange it would look to see a “Hey, X from here” after an existing one was already posted — and you’re acting on your…

Thank you for explaining this all far more eloquently than I ever could. DDG is precious and worth preserving, it wouldn't take much for the press to have a field day with a couple of careless comments. And no, I don't have a stake in DDG other than as a user.

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

#368

Post by anyzen » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 10:19 AM UTC

nsomaru wrote: post #331

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…

Google don’t sell privacy. Anyways, what’s this got to do with Google? “Privacy browser violates basic privacy to do something useless” is actually ridiculous. And the response is even more ridiculous! How does literally every single other browser do it? I’m disappointed because I put my reputation on the line to recommend DDG to users based on...privacy. But here we see they actually do not hold true to their stated…

> Google don’t sell privacy.

Of course they do. They sell users' privacy for advertising dollars.

I am not defending DDG here, as they are clearly in the wrong - but let's not pretend that their error is even close to what Google does.

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

#369

Post by _hl_ » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 10:19 AM UTC

yegg wrote: post #340

Hi all, Founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo here. I’m literally just waking up and reading the comments here. I’m new to this issue and happy to commit us to move to doing this locally in the browser and will have us move on that ASAP. That said, I want to be clear that we did not and have not collected any personal information here. As other staff have referenced, our services are encrypted and throw away PII like IP addr…

I've already posted this somewhere else, but I'll copy it here again as well:

It's not immediately obvious whether it is more privacy preserving if the client automatically makes a request to each site in the search results while scrolling through the results, especially since you're already trusting DDG when performing the search.

Maybe this should be an opt-in rather than an opt-out feature?

All in all its really not as big of an issue as people here make it out to be.

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

#370

Post by classified » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 10:19 AM UTC

By now it has been sufficiently proven that it is physically impossible to even exist without sending surveillance data to someone on the internet. We should probably update the laws of thermodynamics to include that.