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DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

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DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#1
DuckDuckGo Google Tracks You We DontEver since the news hit about the NSA PRISM surveillance program in the United States, many people have become much more concerned about what exactly search engines are tracking about them.

DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal
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Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#2
They run a tor exit enclave which is really, really, cool; there is a blog post about it here: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/08/duckduckgo-now-o...

One motivation for switching: they have lots of "gadgets" like Google, and will take suggestions and/or apparently let you develop new ones. Here is a cool example: https://duckduckgo.com/goodies#Programming/crontab_0_0______...

Another useful feature: https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

I just searched Google (heh) and apparently DDG makes their money from affiliate links at the moment. I've been considering switching to DDG so I'll have to make an effort to do my Amazon searches through them; it's a really easy way to support them.

EDIT: useful method of switching: http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/255650

Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#4
post #3

If NSA could subpoena Google, they can (and probably do) do the same with DDG. Not that I don't wish them success, but PRISM is not the right reason to switch search engine to them.

If I recall correctly, DDG claims not to keep a record of your searches, so a subpoena would not provide anyone with much information.

Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#5
post #3

If NSA could subpoena Google, they can (and probably do) do the same with DDG. Not that I don't wish them success, but PRISM is not the right reason to switch search engine to them.

DDG logs very litte information...so while NSA can subpoena DDG, there's no data to get.

Developers should read "Playing chicken with cat.jpg" [1] which was a response from cperciva [2] to the 37 Signals privacy blunder. It was discussed quite a bit on HN [3] and for me it was a perspective-changing read on privacy.

[1] http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-01-19-playing-chicken-w...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cperciva

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3484284

Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#6
post #4
post #3

If NSA could subpoena Google, they can (and probably do) do the same with DDG. Not that I don't wish them success, but PRISM is not the right reason to switch search engine to them.

If I recall correctly, DDG claims not to keep a record of your searches, so a subpoena would not provide anyone with much information.

Yep, exactly.

Now, this makes me wonder: What could be an equivalent implementation for e-mails. An e-mail host that encourages immediate download, totally deletes e-mail contents, deletes logs of any sort, etc. when you delete messages?

Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#7
Oh that's cool. I'd forgotten they had the traffic up online. I was wondering how many people had switched over to it over the last week (I've gone back to using it as my default engine again - not for the first time).

How many queries does google process per day? 1B? DDG is up 1M in the last week. So it could realistically represent a 0.1% drop in traffic for google - or am I way off somehow? It's not unrealistic to think it could go up another magnitude again. Then you're starting to talk about a real impact to Google's bottom line.

Very interesting.

Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#8

They run a tor exit enclave which is really, really, cool; there is a blog post about it here: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/08/duckduckgo-now-o... One motivation for switching: they have lots of "gadgets" like Google, and will take suggestions and/or apparently let you develop new ones. Here is a cool example: https://duckduckgo.com/goodies#Programming/crontab_0_0______... Another useful feature: https://…

That is pretty awesome.

I'm curious: was the privacy focus by the DDG guys always there, or was it pushed after they found it was a nice advertising point?

Either way, I think this is a good enough reason for me to finally make the switch.

Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#10
post #6
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I recall correctly, DDG claims not to keep a record of your searches, so a subpoena would not provide anyone with much information.

Yep, exactly. Now, this makes me wonder: What could be an equivalent implementation for e-mails. An e-mail host that encourages immediate download, totally deletes e-mail contents, deletes logs of any sort, etc. when you delete messages?

You can start your own mail server and make it encrypt all incoming messages with your GPG or SMIME public key. This way NSA will have to collect your old messages from various senders' servers (or the archive made by their sniffers).
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