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Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

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Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#121

Post by j2kun »

oconnore wrote: post #104
j2kun wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also can't prove that someone won't poison your soup before, during, or after it was prepared from raw ingredients. But you don't claim either to avoid all soup or die. This is because you can give very good guarantees that if the correct process is followed then that won't happen. This is pretty much how we get by in all areas of life. Trust is a default and it has to be for society to function. If we can back u…

Your chef doesn't have a large monetary incentive to poison your soup. Would you eat the food if he did?

They have large monetary incentives to cut corners when it comes to QA and picking a distributor. One big thing stopping them is oversight, which is perfectly reasonable to impose on data collection policies. But what do you need to do so? Proof that the imposed policies give a good guarantee.

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#122

Post by j2kun »

cheatsheet wrote: post #98
j2kun wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, you are disagreeing with their chosen definition for a word you prefer to think of in a different way. Maybe you should study the issue instead of griping about how lame their version is. What does accessible mean? Who is the owner of a piece of data? For example, just because of our interaction here, I could probably get a pretty good estimate of your occupation, age, and gender. Is that "accessing" something…

Definitions of words matter when people skim text as to determine how they communicate their opinions, form their opinions, and take action, including writing legislation. If I was actually typing out the opinions of my spouse word for word: whose age combined with my own is divisible by 3, how would that change your view?

Of course definitions matter. My point is that your definition is not specific enough to be useful.

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#123

Post by OvidNaso »

stcredzero wrote: post #94
kardos wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is someone else's poor choice regarding privacy a justification for abandoning the fight for privacy? There's always a subset of people who don't care. There was a time when women didn't have the right to vote, and although I wasn't around during that time, I'm sure there was a subset of women who didn't care. Their apathy is not a justification for withholding that right from the rest.

There's always a subset of people who don't care. The problem is when it's the seeming majority who don't care.

But this is the case in many social issues that are eventually "won". Only a couple of years ago the vast majority of people in the US firmly believed marijuana should remain illegal and that number has dropped enough to change many state laws. How about gay, women or minority rights. All of them were strongly opposed by the masses.

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#124

Post by steeples »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #18

And there are indeed a few solutions that actually grant you partial relief from the pains of online tracking. First, switch your search engine, email and other major services where your personal information is heavily tracked to good private alternatives. Second, add EFF’s HTTPS Everywhere plugin to your browser, which will encrypt web site connections where possible. Third, add EFF’s Privacy Badger plugin to your b…

AFAIK the only way to do tracking is some combination of images and JS. All these 'blocking' plugins are redundant when those two seemingly elephants in the room are disabled.

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#125

Post by tempestn »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #111
yegg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specific examples you're willing to share really help us improve. Feel free to send them to us at inbound at duckduckgo.

My biggest pain point with DuckDuckGo, is locality. I search for "hdmi cable" on DuckDuckGo and it gives me links to products that are sold in BestBuy and Walmart... They don't exist here in the UK. It also gives me links to Amazon.COM and Ebay.COM... I do the same search on Google and it gives me links to Currys, Tesco, Argos and Maplin (all UK shops/sites). And it links me to Amazon.CO.UK and Ebay.CO.UK. I don't us…

I expect if they did use these signals to automatically set geography, some of their user base would assume that their location is being "tracked".

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#126

Post by TruthWillFree »

jff wrote: post #106
TruthWillFree wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://wiki.project-pm.org/wiki/Endgame_Systems

Still not seeing any G.T. connection. Mind taking off the foil hat and beaming the info to my mind or something?

Look at the physical addresses...Shrill.

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#128

Post by cheatsheet »

j2kun wrote: post #122
cheatsheet wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitions of words matter when people skim text as to determine how they communicate their opinions, form their opinions, and take action, including writing legislation. If I was actually typing out the opinions of my spouse word for word: whose age combined with my own is divisible by 3, how would that change your view?

Of course definitions matter. My point is that your definition is not specific enough to be useful.

Yours is mathematically nonsensical. You either have discrete containers that denote privacy relations between information and parties or you do not have it at all. Privacy does not exist on a gradient on a computer. You can not calculate the percentage of how private something is. If it is marked 'private information' and that information is released to a party not under the user / group / role term that is supposed to have access to that category of information, then that information ceases to be private.

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#129

Post by logn »

fpgaminer wrote: post #101
justcommenting wrote: post #2

I've also noticed the quality of DuckDuckGo search results has been steadily improving, especially over the past year. I would encourage anyone who tried it and went back to another search engine to consider giving DuckDuckGo another shot--you may be pleasantly surprised!

I've had this question for awhile ... What is the advantage to using DuckDuckGo, with respect to privacy? All I've found is that they say privacy is important and that they don't track users. But I see no way for them to prove that. So you still have to trust them not to spy on you. Perhaps on the whole that is better than alternatives. "Google is definitely spying on me" versus "DuckDuckGo might be spying on me". Is…

> If that's the only difference, isn't Google-over-Tor a better option?

No, DDG is better because they don't limit or captcha you over Tor.

Also, brand names do matter. If DDG has staked their reputation on privacy, it's a safer bet. It would be difficult for them to be monetizing personal data when it's their stated policy not to. You'd have to hope the people you're selling this data to keep their mouths shut and so do DDG (ex)employees.

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#130

Post by schoen »

jaryd wrote: post #107
schoen wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found DDG commonly does worse than Google on long natural-language questions, especially ones that are mainly made up of common words, and also seems to have more trouble than Google with automatically splitting queries into relevant noun phrases (like if a query included "vegetarian restaurant new york", I expect Google more reliably to decompose that into (vegetarian restaurant) (new york) than DDG). But I'll kee…

We've actually been working on improving relevancy for queries like your example ("vegetarian restaurant new york") -- check it out! https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vegetarian+restaurant+new+york

Huh, it sure got that one right! Way to go. I'll keep an eye out for cases where this does or doesn't work in the future.
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