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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

#451

Post by neya »

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…

If you claim to fight for privacy and rise to popularity by shaming your competitors' evil anti-privacy (or shady) practices and do something exactly what the rest do, you deserve every bit of criticism. Why should you receive a free pass and the competitors shouldn't? Simply because of your marketing stance??

And for the record, collecting your browser history just to display a stupid favicon is the most ridiculous excuse I've heard in a long while. And I am not going to blindly believe them because they said that's what they use it for.

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

#453

Post by fooqux »

jsnell wrote: post #421
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…

Oh, please. There's a million threads on HN complaining about Google and Facebook. Doesn't even matter if they did something, any post will still have those comments. You can't consider the proportionality of the response by just one thread. It's really quite amazing that when a company that's hitched it's brand entirely to privacy first commits a big privacy faux pas, hides it for a year, and then doubles down on it…

>hides it for a year

Huh? It's an open source project. Maybe you consider them closing the issue on GH to be "hiding it" but I don't. And the plenty of people talking about it in that thread still apparently don't, either.

IMHO their response made sense. You're already trusting DDG with your search history which for most people might as well be a list of 99% of the domains they visit. If you trust their privacy policy for that, I don't see the big deal here.

I do agree that it should be changed, but only because as is it seems imperfect and I seek perfection in most things. Again, it's an OSS project. AFAIK, any one of these people comprising the screaming masses are free to fix it themselves. Personally, I don't think it's worth my time.

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

#454

Post by ddevault »

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…

Thank you for re-opening and prioritizing this.

However, this problem demonstrates gross incompotence for a browser team supposedly concerned with privacy. Will you please do a post-mortem on how this code made it through your code review process in the first place, as well as how it managed to stay in place for a full year after it was pointed out that it represented a privacy problem?

"Sends every URL you visit to the vendor's servers" is the single worst thing DuckDuckGo could have done for privacy in this web browser, and that needs to be accounted for. There was a major failure in the code review process, ticket review process, and in how you treat your community. A standard marketroid "by design" response with washy promises that "we'll take very good care of this highly sensitive personal data, just trust us" is not something I want to see in the future from this team.

[reposted from GitHub]

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

#455

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

phkahler wrote: post #445
jsnell wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, please. There's a million threads on HN complaining about Google and Facebook. Doesn't even matter if they did something, any post will still have those comments. You can't consider the proportionality of the response by just one thread. It's really quite amazing that when a company that's hitched it's brand entirely to privacy first commits a big privacy faux pas, hides it for a year, and then doubles down on it…

It was not IMHO meant to deflect from DDG. It was a more general statement about peoples responses. I dislike trendy phrases but the one in play here is "outrage culture". Its not good and it's getting more common.

Thanks, that was exactly my point, which some people are missing.

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

#456

Post by xvolter »

neya wrote: post #451
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…

If you claim to fight for privacy and rise to popularity by shaming your competitors' evil anti-privacy (or shady) practices and do something exactly what the rest do, you deserve every bit of criticism. Why should you receive a free pass and the competitors shouldn't? Simply because of your marketing stance?? And for the record, collecting your browser history just to display a stupid favicon is the most ridiculous…

I agree with this.

As a privacy-first company, for them to make any decision that is for performance but adds additional privacy risk shows they make the wrong decisions.

They also left this for over a year after being told about it and part of the only reason it was caught was that their browser app is open-source. What about all their closed-source services, like their favicon service their browser apparently relies on.

We shouldn't blindly trust any company and a privacy-first company should be willing to assume we don't trust them and therefore it is up to them to prove everything they do.

I get a few of the responses on their Github page are now non-helpful, but the big point here is that by DuckDuckGo taking this series of actions (implementing the browser like this, ignoring a valid bug report about it, and only reopening the issue after massive push from users) it shows that DuckDuckGo isn't as privacy-focused as I thought, nor many others.

I've been using DuckDuckGo as my sole search provider for several years now, on all my devices, but I'm concerned about what else they may have done in the sake of "performance" over privacy.

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

#457

Post by im3w1l »

jacquesm wrote: post #437
im3w1l wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it does the opposite. Hearing engineers speaking off-message inspires trust, while pr-evasion and weasel speak makes me think they have something to hide.

That's nice. But in this particular case the engineer says things that I know for a fact are not in line with DDG's mission statement so even if he speaks off-message he's actually destroying that trust. There is nothing about @yegg's response that strikes me as weasel speak, it is the content that is different and exactly where it matters: privacy first.

> There is nothing about @yegg's response that strikes me as weasel speak

Agree, didn't mean to imply that.

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

#458

Post by elliekelly »

ddevault wrote: post #454
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…

Thank you for re-opening and prioritizing this. However, this problem demonstrates gross incompotence for a browser team supposedly concerned with privacy. Will you please do a post-mortem on how this code made it through your code review process in the first place, as well as how it managed to stay in place for a full year after it was pointed out that it represented a privacy problem? "Sends every URL you visit to…

I’ve worked with many companies who have demonstrated “gross incompetence” when it comes to privacy and information security. This is absolutely not an example of gross incompetence.

I agree that for a company built around privacy even the appearance of impropriety needs to be avoided. DDG holds themselves to a higher standard and their users hold them to a higher standard.

This was a design flaw and a process flaw. DDG prioritized speed and efficiency over privacy (or in this case, perceived privacy) and I suspect there isn’t a soul on HN who hasn’t made that trade off at some point. They assessed the cost/benefit and risk/reward and it turned out their assessment was wrong. Now they’re fixing it. It happens. But to call this gross incompetence is really blowing it completely out of proportion.

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

#459

Post by ddevault »

elliekelly wrote: post #458
ddevault wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for re-opening and prioritizing this. However, this problem demonstrates gross incompotence for a browser team supposedly concerned with privacy. Will you please do a post-mortem on how this code made it through your code review process in the first place, as well as how it managed to stay in place for a full year after it was pointed out that it represented a privacy problem? "Sends every URL you visit to…

I’ve worked with many companies who have demonstrated “gross incompetence” when it comes to privacy and information security. This is absolutely not an example of gross incompetence. I agree that for a company built around privacy even the appearance of impropriety needs to be avoided. DDG holds themselves to a higher standard and their users hold them to a higher standard. This was a design flaw and a process flaw.…

I'm not blowing it out of proportion. This one specific "design flaw", if we're being generous, has been raised many times with many different browser vendors and add-on vendors as a very bad thing that you cannot do. There is plentiful wisdom on this issue.

The first rule of privacy is never handle the private data in the first place. An accidental leak is one thing, but deliberately designing a feature whose side effect is exfiltrating heaps of private data, then doubling down on it for a year after it's pointed out to you, then doubling down again when it's raised on HN - this is gross incompetence.

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

#460

Post by sokoloff »

classified wrote: post #440
sokoloff wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think that line is speaking for others. It is characterizing what others are actually saying .

Exactly. Everyone should decide for themselves how big of an issue it is for them and not one person who just shrugs it off. That person made their statement sound like a universal fact.

I think the most charitable (and probably the default) reading of that clause has an implied "I believe" prepended. It certainly does not have an implied "It is a universal fact that" prepended.

By way of analogy, when you earlier said "This is ludicrous. Can we switch to the metric system already?" no one thinks that you're speaking for everyone, but rather are advancing your own belief in the "This is ludicrous." sentence.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23660985

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