Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DuckDuckGo Founding Member in Global Privacy Control Standards Effort

spreadprivacy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 70 posts

Re: DuckDuckGo Founding Member in Global Privacy Control Standards Effort

#31

Post by BelleOfTheBall »

Mc_Big_G wrote: post #11
Angeo34 wrote: post #6

So nobody will mention Mr. Weinberg business history. His last company used to accumulate private personal user info and then sell all to brokers and advertisers. DDG and privacy is a literal oxymoron just like Brave and privacy are. Google and Microsoft Edge are more private even though neither has any privacy.

I'll bite. How are DDG and Brave not helping to protect your privacy?

> Google and Microsoft Edge are more private even though neither has any privacy.

This line in their post gives away how overblown that stance is. There's simply no way for DDG to be as bad as Google, much less worse than Google.

Still, I know Brave got caught hijacking links but DDG is, among all well-known search engines, the most privacy-friendly without a doubt. Especially coupled with a good browsers and some add-ons. I'm talking specifically about Firefox but I'm sure people here have some more unusual solutions they prefer.

Re: DuckDuckGo Founding Member in Global Privacy Control Standards Effort

#32

Post by ffpip »

Angeo34 wrote: post #22
Mc_Big_G wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll bite. How are DDG and Brave not helping to protect your privacy?

Brave also still hijacks links and Braves tor implementation actually makes it easier to track you. Also generally the team has ignored fingerprinting issues since years that allow unique identification despite Eich saying they are so easy to fix (see my history on HN Eich even replied yet all those bugs are still open since multiple years)

> still hijacks links

No. They removed the sketchy affiliate thing.

Re: DuckDuckGo Founding Member in Global Privacy Control Standards Effort

#33

Post by boogies »

Mc_Big_G wrote: post #11
Angeo34 wrote: post #6

So nobody will mention Mr. Weinberg business history. His last company used to accumulate private personal user info and then sell all to brokers and advertisers. DDG and privacy is a literal oxymoron just like Brave and privacy are. Google and Microsoft Edge are more private even though neither has any privacy.

I'll bite. How are DDG and Brave not helping to protect your privacy?

Copying from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24710306 because so many people are repeating the same misleading “hijacking links” FUD:

What does that have to do with privacy? I don’t use Brave (I won’t use anything Chromium-based while it has such dangerously high market share), but I think that controversy was exaggerated. All they where doing was adding redundant metadata (already present in the useragent string), IUUC not tied to any identity other than their own (not just an “anonymized” identity, no unique user identifier at all) to get some non-privacy-violating profit. And the phrase “hijacking links” is quite misleading — they didn’t change any actual links on pages, only added affiliate codes to the suggested omnibar completions you could choose to accept.

(Edit:) DDG I would be careful about. I still use it but try not to recommend it without mentioning https://github.com/asciimoo/searx — which I think is worthy of trust, being Free/Libre — because of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23708166.

Re: DuckDuckGo Founding Member in Global Privacy Control Standards Effort

#34

Post by ssorallen »

esperent wrote: post #23
Angeo34 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never got this logic. If it's about privacy they are obliged to proof that they are private especially with such a backstory. It's like Google saying "yes we are private" and then data share with the entirety of the US gov without any order. Why do you trust DDG did they do anything to earn your trust or is your trust that worthless?

I don't have any particular trust in them. However, they've staked their entire business model on privacy. That would be foolish if their intent is to sell user info, because doing that is unlikely to stay private for long.

Their entire business model is [selling advertisements][0], same as Google.

[0]: https://help.duckduckgo.com/company/advertising-and-affiliat...

Re: DuckDuckGo Founding Member in Global Privacy Control Standards Effort

#35

Post by pb7 »

mrweasel wrote: post #27
ffpip wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any source? They have always avoided the question of how much they were dependent on Bing.

No one has a source for “DuckDuckGo is just Bing” either. We know that they use Bing, but not for what, people have just asserted that DDG is just Bing (or Yandex), but no one seems to be able to provide at source to back up the claim.

>To do that, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google).[0]

Seems pretty clear their standard search results come from Bing. It even used to say "multiple partners like Bing, Yahoo, etc" but Yahoo was also powered by Bing. They like to change the wording to make themselves sound less reliant on Bing even though if Bing were to cut off access, DuckDuckGo would immediately cease working.

[0] https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

Re: DuckDuckGo Founding Member in Global Privacy Control Standards Effort

#36

Post by nwah1 »

It is ironic that every new preference meant to enhance privacy only adds more bits of information by which to fingerprint you.

But maybe fingerprinting is unavoidable. As far as I understand, to avoid fingerprinting, you would need to not have any browser cache at all.

Re: DuckDuckGo Founding Member in Global Privacy Control Standards Effort

#37

Post by chris_f »

TekMol wrote: post #2

If Bing ever drops DuckDuckGo, will there be a search engine they can fall back on?

Gigablast, Mojeek, and Yandex (already a source of DDG results in Russia I believe) all have their own search indexes and APIs to access them.

For a completely independent search engine, Gigabalst is surprisingly good in terms of index and relevance. Not as good as Google or Bing, but I think it is a one-man operation. Mojeek also just received an investment to build out their index.

At Runnaroo, I partially use Google as the backend, but I have done a good amount of testing on the above options in case Google or Bing stop being options.

Just as important as the search results, Bing provides the monetization for DDG through their ad network, so DDG is dependent on Bing for two critical parts of the business. I don't think Bing will ever kick them off because it must be very profitable for them and they need to do everything they can to get marketshare against Google.

Re: DuckDuckGo Founding Member in Global Privacy Control Standards Effort

#38

Post by mrweasel »

pb7 wrote: post #35
mrweasel wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one has a source for “DuckDuckGo is just Bing” either. We know that they use Bing, but not for what, people have just asserted that DDG is just Bing (or Yandex), but no one seems to be able to provide at source to back up the claim.

>To do that, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google). [0]…

I’ve read that multiple times, and no, that’s not clear. At best we can read it as “Results from Bing are mixed into their search results”. Most likely a high percentage, but we don’t know.

Re: DuckDuckGo Founding Member in Global Privacy Control Standards Effort

#39

Post by pb7 »

mrweasel wrote: post #38
pb7 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>To do that, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google). [0]…

I’ve read that multiple times, and no, that’s not clear. At best we can read it as “Results from Bing are mixed into their search results”. Most likely a high percentage, but we don’t know.

Mission accomplished then because they don't want to make it clear. If you really care that much, go back through all the different revisions of that statement through the Internet Archive and see how many times they've been dancing around saying the exact same thing: it's just fucking Bing. Their own crawler returns results for very specific limited topics in their segregated boxes. If they had even one source for one specific query, say "purple cats" that they didn't use Bing for, they could technically claim it's only "mostly" Bing.

Re: DuckDuckGo Founding Member in Global Privacy Control Standards Effort

#40

Post by codegladiator »

Angeo34 wrote: post #21
esperent wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe he's changed. Is there any evidence to suggest DDG is anything but honest?

I never got this logic. If it's about privacy they are obliged to proof that they are private especially with such a backstory. It's like Google saying "yes we are private" and then data share with the entirety of the US gov without any order. Why do you trust DDG did they do anything to earn your trust or is your trust that worthless?

Innocent until proven guilty. By your logic no new company can ever build anything which preserves privacy.

You cannot prove a service preserves your privacy. You can only prove that it does not preserve it.

Post reply on HN