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Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

spreadprivacy.com

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Re: Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

#3
The article doesn't say, but if it used an OpenStreetMap-based routing engine (which you can self-host because, y'know, open data) then the directions might misalign to the display layer which is Apple Maps. Therefore it must send your directions request to Apple. Which I guess is fine, they'll just see "some DDG user" requesting certain directions and it's definitely not the worst company they could be working with, I'm just a bit surprised that DDG went with Apple Maps instead of self hosting.

Re: Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

#4

Does the misleading "spreadprivacy" domain name really do more good than harm? It's fine to market DDG as privacy respecting, but making an astroturf "privacy advice" org is disgusting.

> but making an astroturf "privacy advice" org is disgusting.

Why?

Re: Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

#5

Does the misleading "spreadprivacy" domain name really do more good than harm? It's fine to market DDG as privacy respecting, but making an astroturf "privacy advice" org is disgusting.

I don’t get it, is it some kind of SEO hack? It’s clearly branded as DDG.

Re: Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

#6

Does the misleading "spreadprivacy" domain name really do more good than harm? It's fine to market DDG as privacy respecting, but making an astroturf "privacy advice" org is disgusting.

It clearly says "DuckDuckGo Blog" in the page, so your accusation that it's deliberately causing confusion is just plain false.

Re: Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

#7
It's hard to call it "private" in absolute terms when the principle of operation of the service is to send your data to a third party.

Sure, it's less un-private than using the data vacuum that is Google, but it's still sharing pieces of your life with a random org.

Re: Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

#8
post #3

The article doesn't say, but if it used an OpenStreetMap-based routing engine (which you can self-host because, y'know, open data) then the directions might misalign to the display layer which is Apple Maps. Therefore it must send your directions request to Apple. Which I guess is fine, they'll just see "some DDG user" requesting certain directions and it's definitely not the worst company they could be working with,…

So much can be gleaned from the way points. Google guesses home and work with great accuracy without the need for crazy fancy data analysis.

Re: Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

#9

Does the misleading "spreadprivacy" domain name really do more good than harm? It's fine to market DDG as privacy respecting, but making an astroturf "privacy advice" org is disgusting.

It clearly says "DuckDuckGo Blog" in the page, so your accusation that it's deliberately causing confusion is just plain false.

Are you talking about the footer? A very small percentage of people would scroll all the way to the bottom especially on a relatively long page like this (5583px tall on desktop). Speaking of actually visible branding, there's a DuckDuckGo logo (without wordmark) in the top left corner and that's about it. To most people who aren't familiar with the DuckDuckGo logo, this would indeed look like the site of some privacy advocacy group.

Edit: Didn't notice that the sticky header once you scroll down does say "DuckDuckGo Blog". Not sure why it can't just say that in the actual header; intentionally vague or baffling design?

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