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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

#21

Post by HashingtheCode »

I pity the fools who rely on these maps for real-time directions. Whatever happened to reading a map and making mental notes? What ever happened to people being able to follow street signs and using your common sense?

How did we become so utterly dependent on this technology that only a generation ago was unnecessary?

Driver-less cars with AI powered navigation coming to your house in the not too distant future. It will plot the most efficient course to get your meat-sack self from your house to the corner store to buy bread & milk....and you don't need to think at all about what your legs are doing. That is if you even still walk. Maybe you are so lazy you will order by the noise-polluting drone delivery service.

People marvel at tech, and don't misunderstand my rant, Google Maps, Openstreet Maps etc are extremely useful in researching places, but, we should not become reliant to the point where we cannot function without them. Otherwise we are becoming mindless zombies in this ever tech-infested world of ours where we are loosing basic skills such as navigating from point A to point B.

Very sad state of affairs.

https://www.wired.com/2013/09/navigate-without-gps/

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

#22

Post by soraminazuki »

oefrha wrote: post #13
soraminazuki wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you talking about the footer? Why don't you look at the header? > To most people who aren't familiar with the DuckDuckGo logo, this would indeed look like the site of some privacy advocacy group. Seriously???

> Why don't you look at the header? And why don't you look at my comment talking about the header? > Seriously??? You seriously think more than 10% of Internet users recognize the DuckDuckGo logo? (Actually, s/10%/1%/.)

> And why don't you look at my comment talking about the header?

1. You only mentioned about it in an edit, it's disingenuous to suggest that I intentionally ignored it.

2. It says "DuckDuckGo News" even before you scroll down the page.

> You seriously think more than 10% of Internet users recognize the DuckDuckGo logo?

I find the accusation that DDG is engaging in "astroturfing" when they clearly identify themselves ridiculous.

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

#23

Post by rwmj »

After getting thoroughly sick of the full page "pop up" that Google Search and Youtube both now display on just about every visit, I switched to DDG for search and youtube-dl for YT and it's actually been great. DDG results are fine, and the !bang (!g, !w etc) makes it really easy to jump to other search engines / places if I really need it. Google have lost me as a regular customer for good.

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

#24

Post by actuator »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #2

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 have used DDG for the past five years and I like it as a hedge to keep other search engines honest but this is not in good taste.

If they want a product blog, rather than using something like this as a name, they can simply do what other respectable companies do and use something like

- duckduckgoblog.com

- duckduckgo.com/blog/

- blog.duckduckgo.com

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

#25

Post by oefrha »

soraminazuki wrote: post #22
oefrha wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why don't you look at the header? And why don't you look at my comment talking about the header? > Seriously??? You seriously think more than 10% of Internet users recognize the DuckDuckGo logo? (Actually, s/10%/1%/.)

> And why don't you look at my comment talking about the header? 1. You only mentioned about it in an edit, it's disingenuous to suggest that I intentionally ignored it. 2. It says "DuckDuckGo News" even before you scroll down the page. > You seriously think more than 10% of Internet users recognize the DuckDuckGo logo? I find the accusation that DDG is engaging in "astroturfing" when they clearly identify themselves…

> 1. You only mentioned about it in an edit, it's disingenuous to suggest that I intentionally ignored it.

My comment was talking about the actual header in the first place. And I posted the edit about the sticky header like ten minutes before your reply. But maybe you didn't refresh the page, so whatever. If I was disingenuous I wouldn't have labelled it clearly as an edit, unlike the site which isn't clearly labeled as a corporate blog, until you scroll down.

> 2. It says "DuckDuckGo News" even before you scroll down the page.

"DuckDuckGo News" is only a category among many. A privacy advocacy group blog can't have a category called "DuckDuckGo News"? Hell, many people's personal blogs have Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. categories.

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

#26

Post by ephesee »

lucb1e wrote: post #20
tinus_hn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article states the directions are calculated by the Apple Maps engine.

Where? When I look(ed) for it, all it says is > like our embedded maps, powered by Apple's MapKit JS framework The JavaScript framework they use is not necessarily the same as the server-side routing engine. One can overlay data (like the path to drive and turns to take) with any mapping library like google, leaflet, etc.

You're right. But seeing requests that look like "https://duckduckgo.com/mapkit/?https://api.apple-mapkit.com/......" there is little doubt that DDG forwards directions requests to Apple APIs.

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

#27

Post by [deleted] »

fooqux wrote: post #14
rietta wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But only because they can tie it to a user account . If DDG is the middleduck acting as an anonymizing layer, Apple won't be able to perform such analysis on the data. This is all conjecture obviously, it's hard to know exactly how much data Apple is getting, and if they could use something else to fingerprint users, but I'll give DDG the benefit of doubt for now.

[deleted]

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

#28

Post by Shared404 »

qrbLPHiKpiux wrote: post #11
rhn_mk1 wrote: post #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.

> If you’re using something that’s “free...,” you’re the product being sold. A lot of people still don’t realize this, or just don’t care.

> If you’re using something that’s “free...,” you’re the product being sold.

Free as in beer, yes. FL/OSS, no.

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

#29

Post by hombre_fatal »

oefrha wrote: post #9
soraminazuki wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 privac…

You’re basically nitpicking that they used their logo alone in the header instead of also putting “DDG” there which is petty.

If you were actually confused (hard to believe) just reading the content would clarify any confusion. Check out the first line of the article.

This thread would have a point if the blog spoke of DDG in the third person, but it doesn’t.

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