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Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

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Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#141

Post by nl »

Aoyagi wrote: post #86
amelius wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, because DDG can't build a profile of you, it would have to resort to some guessing. For example, if you search for "python", it would have to guess whether you are a programmer, or a biologist, in order to present the most relevant results. And of course, Google already has all this information...

...not that kind of guessing. Obviously. That's not "similar to the search query", that's just different meanings of words/phrases. I didn't say anything about that, but it looks like you didn't read past the first sentence anyway. Example of what I meant: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=BMW+723i

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22BMW+723i%22

Seriously, quoting that is a reasonable solution. Given the comparative popularity of the two, it seems statistically likely that most people actually wanted a 323i. Having said that, I note that Google doesn't show 323i results for 723i, so... hm.

I do think explaining the substitution that was done and linking to the exact search (ie, how Google does it) would be a good feature though.

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#142

Post by yellowapple »

rom16384 wrote: post #47
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.

I find the auto-correct to be over-zealous. If DDG decides that what I've entered is a typo, It will only show me results for the "corrected" word, so I'll have to quote uncommonly searched words. This usually happens when the search is similar to another one that is much more common.

As a workaround, you can prefix the word in question with a +, and DDG will recognize that you really did mean to search for that specific word.

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#143

Post by droopyEyelids »

stavrianos wrote: post #136
warfangle wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just did a surface audit. They set and read no cookies. You can test this yourself. They set etags on static assets, and those theoretically could be used to track you as an identifiable visitor. How else would they track you? By IP address? That would make any kind of tracking useless -- how would you deal with trying to track 100,000 connections from behind NAT, individually, other than cookies or etags? There's br…

What evidence of browser fingerprinting would you expect to see?

a bulky or obfuscated javascript file probing the standard fingerprinting areas of your browser

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#144

Post by stcredzero »

OvidNaso wrote: post #123
stcredzero wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Only a couple of years ago the vast majority of people in the US firmly believed marijuana should remain illegal

Really? In my circles, even when I lived in "red" states, the attitude was more like it's a damn shame it's illegal, and too bad there isn't a prayer of it changing.

How about gay, women or minority rights. All of them were strongly opposed by the masses.

In the 1st and 3rd case, of course, because the subject group was a minority. In the case of women, things only changed when enough of the subject group started to demand change. In the case of privacy, the subject group isn't distinct from the masses, it is everyone. So yes, it's a problem for progress until everyone gets more clued in. (It will happen, when enough bad stuff has happened.)

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#145

Post by jwatte »

Privacy is not achievable. It's much better to build a world where we can all live happy /without/ privacy.

This requires an attitude adjustment and significant tolerance because everything is public.

Want to know if your bank treats customers good or bad? Look it up. Want to know if the issuer bets against a mortgage backed security? Audit the numbers. Want to cheat on your taxes? Tough luck!

The thing is, we only have two options:

1. Only spooks and marketers and those who pay, know.

2. We all know.

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#147

Post by warfangle »

droopyEyelids wrote: post #143
stavrianos wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What evidence of browser fingerprinting would you expect to see?

a bulky or obfuscated javascript file probing the standard fingerprinting areas of your browser

Correct. The standard reference is https://panopticlick.eff.org/.

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#148

Post by floatrock »

zipperhead wrote: post #44
falcolas wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have personally found that a hosts file can reduce the need for a bunch of those addons - it can block not only ads, but also many forms of tracking. I've found it very refreshing when surfing the web. For reference, I use: http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

I've thought of using hosts file vs. plugins but have never really made the switch. I'm a bit concerned that I'll run into cases like a website is broken due to a hosts file setting, and I can't easily bypass it like I can with a plugin. Do you ever run into situations like this?

I've found sites that put ads in front of video sometimes break with privacy blockers (anything from news sites to comedycentral.com). I assume there's some code that won't load the content if it can't load the ad. Fair enough -- I'm not actively targetting the ads (something needs to pay for the content), but my privacy blocker gets them sometimes.

For those sites, opening up the site in incognito mode (which is by default sandboxed from any plugins) fixes them. A hostfile blacklist would require far more work to fix the jank.

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#149

Post by shabbyrobe »

schoen wrote: post #135
logn wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or something like "movie with andre the giant". Google gets Princess Bride as result #2. DDG doesn't have a direct link to that in the first batch. I think Google handles ambiguity better (what users are searching for when they don't know how to express it). Of course, Google tends to overdo this too such that simple keyword searches ain't what they used to be.

Google also apparently entirely eliminated the verbatim search mode (some time after making double quotes no longer perform a verbatim search). People now complain that there is no documented way to perform verbatim searches with Google.

At least from Australia, you can still perform a verbatim search by clicking "search tools", "all results", then changing the option to "verbatim". I still sometimes forget I can do this and wonder why Google is ignoring several of my qualifying terms. The deprecation of the plus symbol and double quotes for coercion is the single biggest piece of vandalism I've seen Google commit on their interface in over fifteen largely restrained years.

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#150

Post by Sami_Lehtinen »

shit_parade wrote: post #13
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 also recommend people try startpage.com

+1, Starpage uses Google's search index and DDG uses Bing's. Yet it seems that Google is delivering clearly weakened search results for them?
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