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DuckDuckGo Founding Member in Global Privacy Control Standards Effort

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Re: DuckDuckGo Founding Member in Global Privacy Control Standards Effort

#61

Post by indigochill »

luckylion wrote: post #12
ffpip wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my main concern. Duckduckgo is used more than Bing in many countries and Microsoft might just cancel their access some day. There is always Yandex I guess

Why would Bing cancel, they're presumably making money off of the arrangement. And DDG-users would likely not migrate to Bing, but to Google: if you have to use a product by an anti-privacy-corporation, might as well use the good one.

>might as well use the good one

While I do believe Google has the superior search engine, there may also be an argument for denying them the "vertical integration of identity". That is, if you use Gmail and Google Search, Google can figure out more about you (in theory) than if you use just Gmail. Same reason I never -ever- use Facebook SSO for logging into non-Facebook sites.

Re: DuckDuckGo Founding Member in Global Privacy Control Standards Effort

#62

Post by warrenq »

nwah1 wrote: post #36

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.

Duck Duck Go exists because they figured out to cleverly target and market to a specific demographic using the right trigger words.

This is no different from Gold Peddlers selling to Doomer-Preppers pointing that Government is the Enemy while nicely pocketing the profits from the gullibility of their target audience

Re: DuckDuckGo Founding Member in Global Privacy Control Standards Effort

#63

Post by the-rc »

sct202 wrote: post #52
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.

We can infer some things about DDG based published data on crawler and bot activity. DDG's index is pretty comparable to both Google and Bing, but their bot is no where to be found in activity stats. So it's pretty reasonable to think that at minimum their index is primarily derived from 3rd parties. https://deviceatlas.com/blog/most-active-bots-and-crawlers-w... https://www.imperva.com/blog/most-active-good-bots/ In…

What kind of ranking can you do for a page on the internet if you didn't crawl its contents? It has to rely on other signals.

Re: DuckDuckGo Founding Member in Global Privacy Control Standards Effort

#64

Post by philistine »

Retric wrote: post #51
mda wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try a more complex query. e.g. "difference between wet and dry suit" bing and ddg web site results are almost identical, only ranking differences. Youtube results on the page are identical. Google is quite different. "average temperature of a dog" Again bing ddg very similar, Google completely different. "average lifespan of a domestic cat" "list of medication that has interactions with grapefruit". Just try more com…

“average temperature of a dog“ Bing and ddg are somewhat closer, but far from identical. Include the second page of googles results, and all three have vetinfo.com etc, but bing and google have two links to www.quora.com where ddg doesn’t have any. I only bring that up because of you compare results under the assumption that bing and ddg are identical it’s easy to overstate the similarities.

I mean, what IS the average temperature of a dog?

Re: DuckDuckGo Founding Member in Global Privacy Control Standards Effort

#65

Post by nitrogen »

godelski wrote: post #48
nwah1 wrote: post #36

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.

If DNT is a setting and respected by the website, how is this fingerprinting? My understanding is fingerprinting you need multiple metrics to compare to ensure someone is unique and thus you couldn't fingerprint purely based on a single setting (DNT) alone. (Obviously if it is not respected it becomes one more metric to add to enable better fingerprinting)

Check out EFF's Panopticlick demo. You basically answered your own question in your final parenthetical.

Re: DuckDuckGo Founding Member in Global Privacy Control Standards Effort

#66

Post by pbronez »

ssorallen wrote: post #34
esperent wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

DDG is using a very old version of Google’s business model: they serve ads based on your search string. That’s it. No search history mining. No email reading. No broadly deployed analytics snippets and browser logins to reconstruct your whole browsing history.

I’m already sending my search query to DDG for them to give me search results. They don’t ask for any additional data. They just allow advertisers to bid on the first few results for a particular topic.

I’m ok with that.

Re: DuckDuckGo Founding Member in Global Privacy Control Standards Effort

#67

Post by godelski »

nitrogen wrote: post #65
godelski wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If DNT is a setting and respected by the website, how is this fingerprinting? My understanding is fingerprinting you need multiple metrics to compare to ensure someone is unique and thus you couldn't fingerprint purely based on a single setting (DNT) alone. (Obviously if it is not respected it becomes one more metric to add to enable better fingerprinting)

Check out EFF's Panopticlick demo. You basically answered your own question in your final parenthetical.

But part of this article is about giving DNT some teeth. The parenthetical statement was to show I understand that without the legal teeth it is another metric. But by ignoring the legal part you're ignoring the entire point of the post and my comment.

Re: DuckDuckGo Founding Member in Global Privacy Control Standards Effort

#68

Post by OpticalWindows »

nwah1 wrote: post #36

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.

At last we see the end of the funnel. Both sides of an argument push 'progress' for a desired result.

Re: DuckDuckGo Founding Member in Global Privacy Control Standards Effort

#70

Post by mda »

Retric wrote: post #51
mda wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try a more complex query. e.g. "difference between wet and dry suit" bing and ddg web site results are almost identical, only ranking differences. Youtube results on the page are identical. Google is quite different. "average temperature of a dog" Again bing ddg very similar, Google completely different. "average lifespan of a domestic cat" "list of medication that has interactions with grapefruit". Just try more com…

“average temperature of a dog“ Bing and ddg are somewhat closer, but far from identical. Include the second page of googles results, and all three have vetinfo.com etc, but bing and google have two links to www.quora.com where ddg doesn’t have any. I only bring that up because of you compare results under the assumption that bing and ddg are identical it’s easy to overstate the similarities.

I didn't say identical. They apparently use the same index, not necessarily the same ranking algorithm or the same version of it.
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