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Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

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Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#151

Post by danShumway »

unknownaccount wrote: post #92

Can someone please explain why we are supposed to trust DDG? Isnt it just a random website that popped up out of nowhere claiming to be private yet no audit has ever been conducted which substantiated those claims?

You're not supposed to totally trust DDG, but they are a better default search engine than Google if you care about privacy.

- they are less likely to throw a captcha in your face if you connect over VPN

- they have less surveillance infrastructure and run less code clientside than Google does

- they are at least not explicitly tracking you

- they have a lower number of secondary data-points from other services that can be connected to your searches

the list kind of goes on. I don't assume that DuckDuckGo is perfectly trustworthy just because they say so, but Debian has a choice of a couple of different default search engines that are mature enough and give good enough results to use as a default search tool: Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc...

Of those choices, DuckDuckGo seems to be a pretty reasonable decision.

At the very least, DuckDuckGo lets me search when I'm behind a VPN and have anti-fingerprinting tools turned on, Google very often doesn't. It's not a super-hard decision for me which one is more private.

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#152

Post by marginalia_nu »

_-david-_ wrote: post #146
marginalia_nu wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general I'm not a big fan of censorship. I think it's ultimately counterproductive. It sends the message that the "truth" needs to be protected from independent scrutiny, effectively undermining the credibility of the institutions, while enabling crackpots to develop a persecution narrative. That said I do block some sites, mostly nazi stuff if it's designed in such a way that it crops up in regular searches. It's…

Do you have a list of the blocked domains?

Yeah, I didn't start annotating them until recently though, and like 39700 out of 40000 the domains are blacklisted because of spam. Probably a few false positives in there though but it's 40k domains :-/

You can check if a site is blacklisted using a site:-search like

https://search.marginalia.nu/site/news.ycombinator.com

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#153

Post by 7v3x3n3sem9vv »

unknownaccount wrote: post #129
yegg wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently the National Advertising Division looked into our privacy claims and found them supported, see https://bbbprograms.org/media-center/newsroom/duckduckgo-pri... & https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/privacy-protection/12106... Also a lot of what we do is open source on GitHub. We recently put out a help page detailing or web tracking protections that link to a lot of the relevant repositories: https://help.duc…

Those aren't proper audits. And again, bringing up the fact that it's open source is a meaningless piece of information since there is no way to verify it's the same software code on production. It only serves to trick the average user who doesn't understand how web servers work into trusting your service more. The best thing you could do, if you actually care about privacy and not just $$$, is to open-source the ent…

> Those aren't proper audits. And again, bringing up the face that it's open source is a meaningless piece of information since there is no way to verify it's the same software code on production.

> The best thing you could do, if you actually care about privacy and not just $$$, is to open-source the entire search index db and accompanying webserver software, making it easy for users to setup their own local instance of DDG which is truly auditable.

self hosting isn't feasible for 99% of the population. DDG is aiming to be the mainstream privacy protecting search engine, I used them for a while and can appreciate their efforts. if you want something nerdy and and self hosted use a searX instance or host it yourself.

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#154

Post by 7v3x3n3sem9vv »

unknownaccount wrote: post #99
no_time wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren't supposed to. Even if you assume they lie in every sentence about their data collection, with their current setup it would be much harder for them to build a valuable shadow profile about you. They haven't been caught running fingerprinting scripts yet and they dont have an account system to tie to your searches. At best they could use your ip to build a shadow profile and thats wildly inaccurate in our mos…

How do you know what server-side profiling occurs or does not occur? There is no way to know that. DDG gives people a completely misplaced and false sense of security, when they are just as easily comprimisable/corruptable/subpoenable/susceptible to NSLs, EDRs and secret court orders as any other company. And I disagree with your premise that it's particularly difficult to link a persons IP to their real world identi…

DDG offers a JavaScript-less page. don't trust them use that. don't trust them at all? don't use them?

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#155

Post by slongfield »

unknownaccount wrote: post #92

Can someone please explain why we are supposed to trust DDG? Isnt it just a random website that popped up out of nowhere claiming to be private yet no audit has ever been conducted which substantiated those claims?

If you're worried about it, you can buy searches directly from Bing ( https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/pricing ). DDG makes no secret that the Bing search API is where they get their link and image results -- https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/ .

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#156

Post by paulryanrogers »

jonas-w wrote: post #16

Best approach i think is, they way "ungoogled-chromium" does it. They don't enforce organization policies, but they set the default config to "no search" and then leave it up to the user to change it.

Perhaps a ballot on first run, much like browsers should be in a well regulated market.

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#157

Post by notriddle »

unknownaccount wrote: post #92

Can someone please explain why we are supposed to trust DDG? Isnt it just a random website that popped up out of nowhere claiming to be private yet no audit has ever been conducted which substantiated those claims?

If you don't trust them, use https://duckduckgogg42xjoc72x3sjasowoarfbgcmvfimaftt6twagswz...

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#158

Post by kornhole »

pb7 wrote: post #94
kornhole wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have a few though. Certainly they don't have captive users who only install what they are allowed to and use the default settings. Linux users are probably the worst target market for advertisers.

>Linux users are probably the worst target market for advertisers. Yes but not for the reason you are imagining. I can think of a few things in common between everyone I've ever known to use Linux for personal use and general consumerism to improve quality of life is not one of them.

That is exactly what I was thinking. I suspect the algorithms in the real time bidding engines put anybody with Linux in their browser signature in a very cheap ad category. The market researches probably concluded that these people continue using $200 computers for years and try to repair things instead of buying new wherever possible.

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#159

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

DannyBee wrote: post #106
candiddevmike wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a Chromium bug, not a Debian bug--it's an insidious way to keep Google search as the default.

Uh, no? This is managed policy, and this is a 100% good way of letting the user know that someone else has control of their settings Just because Debian thinks that they are doing the right thing, they are in fact, controlling the user's settings through a policy It's just telling you that, as it should. The notion that it has anything to do with keeping search the default or not is like, such a silly assumption i do…

"Just because Debian thinks that they are doing the right thing, they are in fact, controlling the user's settings through a policy It's just telling you that, as it should."

But by default isn't Google controlling the user's setting through a policy. The policy includes, among other things, the rule that Google is the default search engine. (Needless to say, that setting is a cash cow.)

And in fact, the user that manually changes the default policy herself, i.e., changes the default search engine to something other than Google, versus delegating the decision to a third party such as Debian or Google, cannot remove Google as a search engine choice! It is greyed out. Permanent. Chrome binary allows users to delete all the other choices, except Google.

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#160

Post by unknownaccount »

7v3x3n3sem9vv wrote: post #153
unknownaccount wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those aren't proper audits. And again, bringing up the fact that it's open source is a meaningless piece of information since there is no way to verify it's the same software code on production. It only serves to trick the average user who doesn't understand how web servers work into trusting your service more. The best thing you could do, if you actually care about privacy and not just $$$, is to open-source the ent…

> Those aren't proper audits. And again, bringing up the face that it's open source is a meaningless piece of information since there is no way to verify it's the same software code on production. > The best thing you could do, if you actually care about privacy and not just $$$, is to open-source the entire search index db and accompanying webserver software, making it easy for users to setup their own local instanc…

>self hosting isn't feasible for 99% of the population

Its only this way because companies have a vested interest in keeping it like that. It's how they make their money. It is absolutely within the realm of possibility that people host their own search engine. 99% of people know how to install Google Chrome right? this should be no different. The entire search engine & webserver stack it depends on could be bundled into a .exe/.app installer with simple instructions people can understand. Consider XAMPP- which already provides a webserver stack that is extremely easy to install on Windows/Mac just by a simple .exe/.app that 'just works'. This hypothetical search engine could use similar methods as the XAMPP installer. There is no technical reason why this can't happen. It just isn't happening because it'd increase competition, cutting into DDG's profits.

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