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PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

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Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#11

Post by jmillikin »

bcoates wrote: post #3
rednukleus wrote: post #2

Glad to see them succeeding, but personally the privacy of my web searches doesn't bother me - as long as they aren't being passed along with personally identifying information. I'm far more worried about emails, messaging, video, storage etc. Can someone explain to me (or point me in the direction of something that explains) what Google and Bing store in terms of tracking when you are not logged in? Obviously you ca…

They have access to IP+time, your search query, and cookies for correlation to other requests. It's valuable information and Google openly documents that they are keeping and using it, along with anything else you leak to them: http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/ IP+time is enough to get your personal identity information from your ISP (physical location of the endpoint, billing information), I have no idea if Go…

  > They have access to IP+time, your search query, and
  > cookies for correlation to other requests. It's
  > valuable information
Valuable for blackmail, but not really useful for anything else; the commercial value of information rapidly degrades over time. Knowing I want to buy a new fridge today is very valuable, knowing I wanted to buy one last month is nearly worthless.

  > IP+time is enough to get your personal identity
  > information from your ISP (physical location of the
  > endpoint, billing information), I have no idea if
  > Google's relationship with ISPs is good enough to
  > buy that or if it's only available to cops.
Despite what the RIAA think, a user agent's IP is nowhere near accurate enough for use as identification.

I hope that ISPs do not release personal identity or billing data to arbitrary third parties. I know my ISP (sonic.net) claims they don't[1], and even privacy-insensitive companies such as AT&T have privacy policies that would forbid them from selling personal data[2].

Even if it were possible for random companies to obtain personal data from an ISP, I doubt that Google would have any interest in participating.

[1] https://wiki.sonic.net/wiki/Category:Policies#Privacy

[2] http://www.att.com/gen/privacy-policy?pid=2506

Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#12

Post by darkstar999 »

jpdoctor wrote: post #8

Why would anyone believe that DuckDuckGo isn't already penetrated?

Have a look-see at this section of their Privacy Policy.

https://duckduckgo.com/privacy#s2

Of course, they could be completely full of shit or unknowingly compromised.

My concern is this: even though they don't _collect_ information, they could still forward it on to authorities and not violate this policy.

However, they have a freaking TOR node, so it's almost a moot point.

Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#13

Post by oinksoft »

I ceased using Google search except as a last resort when this story broke, and I had no idea what I had been missing out on with DDG: Excellent keyboard navigation. Also, DDG's results compared to a year ago are night-and-day. It seems to listen to my keywords better than Google did too, a growing annoyance I had. If you haven't, you really should try out DDG for a week.

Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#14

Post by umsm »

dgesang wrote: post #7

Here is a non-US-based alternative: https://startpage.com

Just because they say they don't collect your info, it doesn't mean that google doesn't get it.

Look at the source of a search page and you'll notice that they include scripts directly from google.com...

Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#16

Post by aacook »

This is great news for DuckDuckGo and I'm all for it, however, DuckDuckGo isn't completely private right? From what I see, DuckDuckGo obtains much of its data from 3rd parties, such as Bing/Microsoft and Yahoo. http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s...

"While our indexes are getting bigger, we do not expect to be wholly independent from third-parties. Bing and Google each spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year crawling and indexing the deep Web. It costs so much that even big companies like Yahoo and Ask are giving up general crawling and indexing. Therefore, it seems silly to compete on crawling and, besides, we do not have the money to do so. Instead, we've focused on building a better search engine by concentrating on what we think are long-term value-adds -- having way more instant answers, way less spam, real privacy and a better overall search experience."

Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#17

Post by oneye »

jafaku wrote: post #10
jpdoctor wrote: post #8

Why would anyone believe that DuckDuckGo isn't already penetrated?

Because look at the logo and the design, that duck is cool! And it says it's private! /s

Or because their entire business differentiation from the beginning has been privacy.

This does not mean that it is not compromised, of course. But its why people would believe it isn't compromised. And its a much better reason than your sarcastic imitation.

Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#18

Post by jsingleton »

oinksoft wrote: post #13

I ceased using Google search except as a last resort when this story broke, and I had no idea what I had been missing out on with DDG: Excellent keyboard navigation . Also, DDG's results compared to a year ago are night-and-day. It seems to listen to my keywords better than Google did too, a growing annoyance I had. If you haven't, you really should try out DDG for a week.

I really like the how the goodies have improved (or at least the discoverability). There's some really useful / geeky stuff in there.

https://duckduckgo.com/goodies#Science

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+much+magnesium+is+in+43+cubic+...

Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#19

Post by infinity »

jmillikin wrote: post #11
bcoates wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have access to IP+time, your search query, and cookies for correlation to other requests. It's valuable information and Google openly documents that they are keeping and using it, along with anything else you leak to them: http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/ IP+time is enough to get your personal identity information from your ISP (physical location of the endpoint, billing information), I have no idea if Go…

> They have access to IP+time, your search query, and > cookies for correlation to other requests. It's > valuable information Valuable for blackmail, but not really useful for anything else; the commercial value of information rapidly degrades over time. Knowing I want to buy a new fridge today is very valuable, knowing I wanted to buy one last month is nearly worthless. > IP+time is enough to get your personal iden…

    >>Valuable for blackmail, but not really useful
    >>for anything else; the commercial value of 
    >>information rapidly degrades over time.
    >>Knowing I want to buy a new fridge today is very
    >>valuable, knowing I wanted to buy one last month is      >>nearly worthless.
I think that blackmail is already bad enough. Considering which topics somebody might want to learn about on the internet, various diseases for example.

    >>I hope that ISPs do not release personal
    >>identity or billing data to arbitrary third parties.
I hope that too. But this information is gathered and stored somewhere in flawed systems which are operated by humans which might decide to follow their own interests more than the interests of the customers. I know of at least one story where an employee of a search engine has been using his privileges to stalk other people.
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