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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

#101

Post by bcoates »

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…

> I hope that ISPs do not release personal identity or billing data to arbitrary third parties.

My ISP, Time Warner/RoadRunner, claims that they will do so. It's kind of ambiguous because their declaration combines several services and kinds of data covered by different laws. I think the applicable part for their cable ISP service is:

  In the course of providing Time Warner Cable Services 
  to you, we may disclose your personally identifiable 
  information to [...] consumer and market research firms,
  credit reporting agencies and authorized representatives
  of governmental bodies.
Selling their DHCP logs and customer records to a commercial data aggregator (who could then sell it to anyone) appears to be compliant with their privacy policy.

http://help.twcable.com/twc_privacy_notice.html

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

#102

Post by pessimizer »

tracker1 wrote: post #96
jpdoctor wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, DDG's results compared to a year ago are night-and-day. Still looks 2nd rate. I replicated one of my last searches (learning rails): rails find if element is in array First hit on google is the stackexchange answer with .include? (which I was spacing-out on) DDG yields the Array docs, which is correct but is a helluva lot of info when I'm looking for a concise answer.

For programming questions, I almost always append site:stackoverflow.com to my search term... generally the anser is on SO, but I prefer the search engine's results over SO's search... on DDG and Google.

if you're using DDG just prepend your query with !so. Using bang notation is like having every search engine in your search bar at once.

...and of course, I had no idea if !so would work before I tried it. The obvious one always seems to work:)

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

#105

Post by gohrt »

devindotcom wrote: post #88
rosser wrote: post #75

An observation: Ghostery blocked 22 trackers on this article. Does it somehow make tracking my every move online okay if it's done for profit? EDIT: phrasing.

I know, it's ridiculous. But people do want to see how many likes the story has, and cross-service comments are pretty next-wave, so you have to have widgets now for 5 social sites, 7 comment systems, global analytics, live analytics, sitewide ad, contextual ad, site cookie and maybe add two more because I haven't thought of them... that's 19 right there! We really need something better than having these MASSIVE amou…

It turns out that if you block all the trackers and 3rd part widgets, the website continues to function as the use desires, and nothing of value is lost.

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

#106

Post by kostya-kow »

suyash wrote: post #31

And as far as browser is concerned, I would recommend go with Firefox vs Google or Safari. Mozilla is a non profit and I feel I can trust it the most.

The only safe thing to do would be to compile Firefox or Chromium yourself.

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

#107

Post by gohrt »

mikemoka wrote: post #81

I like DDG, but has it ever mentioned how this TRACKING data is used? http://duckduckgo.com/l/?kh=-1&uddg=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dmv.org... (every time you click on a search result you actually click on a link like this,which redirects you to the actual page) Is it just for pagerank?

DDG just claims they don't store your history. Presumably they could use redirected clicks as quality signal, without tying it to your browser cookies.

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

#108

Post by oinksoft »

jpdoctor wrote: post #38
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.

> Also, DDG's results compared to a year ago are night-and-day. Still looks 2nd rate. I replicated one of my last searches (learning rails): rails find if element is in array First hit on google is the stackexchange answer with .include? (which I was spacing-out on) DDG yields the Array docs, which is correct but is a helluva lot of info when I'm looking for a concise answer.

This impression must partially be due to how you write your queries, and the quality of the natural language parsing in DDG/Bing (your query leaning heavily on that). I searched "ruby element in array", Rails not being a programming language, and I get the Ruby Array docs with the first result (which is what I would want) and the StackOverflow result for the third. On Google, the StackOverflow item is first and the Array docs are third for the same query.

In this case you and I think that our respective search engines are providing the better result.

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

#109

Post by rosser »

gohrt wrote: post #105
devindotcom wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know, it's ridiculous. But people do want to see how many likes the story has, and cross-service comments are pretty next-wave, so you have to have widgets now for 5 social sites, 7 comment systems, global analytics, live analytics, sitewide ad, contextual ad, site cookie and maybe add two more because I haven't thought of them... that's 19 right there! We really need something better than having these MASSIVE amou…

It turns out that if you block all the trackers and 3rd part widgets, the website continues to function as the use desires, and nothing of value is lost.

For some sites, yes. Space.com and Business Insider are two that I've noticed tend not to work if some of their trackers are blocked.
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