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DuckDuckGo Challenges Google on Privacy (With a Billboard in San Francisco)

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101–110 of 224 posts

Re: DuckDuckGo Challenges Google on Privacy (With a Billboard in San Francisco)

#101

Post by dools »

dauphin wrote: post #93
dools wrote: post #90

Turning off HTTP_REFERER doesn't sound like a very good idea. How would you be able to tell how people found you? Knowing what link someone came in from is a great way to see where your site fits into this world wide web of ours. It sounds to me as if the only issue is 3rd party ad networks. The antidote to this seems to me to be more reasonably the web browser's jurisdiction, ie. making the cookie policy more restri…

*referrer

It's actually spelled HTTP_REFERER in the PHP $_SERVER superglobal :)

edit: oops, I see someone beat me to it!

Re: DuckDuckGo Challenges Google on Privacy (With a Billboard in San Francisco)

#102

Post by dauphin »

jarek wrote: post #100
dauphin wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*referrer

Heh, no. The header really is "HTTP_REFERER", and is somewhat notorious for the misspelling.

Open an English dictionary (the Oxford one if you're serious), and come back. Note my fault if tbl didn't know how to speak English corectly backed then.

Re: DuckDuckGo Challenges Google on Privacy (With a Billboard in San Francisco)

#103

Post by jarek »

Some questions...

- is DDG profitable right now?

- is it going to be profitable if their user base grows by 10x? 1000x?

- do they ever expect a need to be profitable?

- if required to be profitable, do they have or foresee a solid business plan that doesn't involve de facto "tracking"?

Re: DuckDuckGo Challenges Google on Privacy (With a Billboard in San Francisco)

#104

Post by [deleted] »

dauphin wrote: post #93
dools wrote: post #90

Turning off HTTP_REFERER doesn't sound like a very good idea. How would you be able to tell how people found you? Knowing what link someone came in from is a great way to see where your site fits into this world wide web of ours. It sounds to me as if the only issue is 3rd party ad networks. The antidote to this seems to me to be more reasonably the web browser's jurisdiction, ie. making the cookie policy more restri…

*referrer

[deleted]

Re: DuckDuckGo Challenges Google on Privacy (With a Billboard in San Francisco)

#106

Post by jarek »

dools wrote: post #101
dauphin wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*referrer

It's actually spelled HTTP_REFERER in the PHP $_SERVER superglobal :) edit: oops, I see someone beat me to it!

It's not just PHP - the HTTP 1.0 specification in RFC 1945 spells it like that.

Re: DuckDuckGo Challenges Google on Privacy (With a Billboard in San Francisco)

#107

Post by dschobel »

mahmud wrote: post #43
truebosko wrote: post #6

Is the whole privacy on search thing really a big issue? I, for one, want Google to be all Orwellian on me because it will mean better search results. I had a scenario like this a few days ago when I googled for "fabric" -- Being a Python developer I was looking for http://fabfile.org and it shows up as the second result while logged in. If I'm not, it won't show up. This may be the outlier state of mind on HN, but I…

Is the whole privacy on search thing really a big issue? Yes it is, if you're a political activist. Both Yahoo and Google have a proven history spying on people on behalf of government.

"spying on people" is a really unfair way to describe what happens when you voluntarily share your information with a third party who is in turn subpoenaed.

You should be taking issue with the governments demanding the records rather than expecting these companies to break the law on your behalf.

Re: DuckDuckGo Challenges Google on Privacy (With a Billboard in San Francisco)

#108

Post by jarek »

dauphin wrote: post #102
jarek wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, no. The header really is "HTTP_REFERER", and is somewhat notorious for the misspelling.

Open an English dictionary (the Oxford one if you're serious), and come back. Note my fault if tbl didn't know how to speak English corectly backed then.

Surely whether or not the RFC's authors know how to spell a word has no bearing on how sensible it is to correct the spelling of "HTTP_REFERER"? I mean, if dools had said "HTTP referer" then you might have had a point, but "HTTP_REFERER" unambiguously refers to the name of the header field.

Re: DuckDuckGo Challenges Google on Privacy (With a Billboard in San Francisco)

#110

Post by dools »

gnaritas wrote: post #96
dools wrote: post #90

Turning off HTTP_REFERER doesn't sound like a very good idea. How would you be able to tell how people found you? Knowing what link someone came in from is a great way to see where your site fits into this world wide web of ours. It sounds to me as if the only issue is 3rd party ad networks. The antidote to this seems to me to be more reasonably the web browser's jurisdiction, ie. making the cookie policy more restri…

Sorry, accidental downvote while highlighting your question. > Turning off HTTP_REFERER doesn't sound like a very good idea. How would you be able to tell how people found you? And what if people in general, by default, don't want you to know that and we just got it wrong by default in the browser?

I don't remember anyone ever discussing the referrer as being an issue before 3rd party ad networks became so prevalent.

This type of tracking exists for loads of other types of marketing, too. Promo codes, questionnaires that say "where did you find us?" and things like that.

Above all, there's nothing a website can do maliciously with that information alone. An IP address and the page you came in from, that's all there is. The only thing of concern is a feature being provided by the browser which allows spammer.com to write to a cookie that was created by facebook.com right?

I think that sending around the referrer is a necessary part of the interconnectedness of the web. I've noticed in my referral strings before that other bloggers have linked to articles which I wrote, then I've stopped past that blogger's site to have a read of their stuff.

I've noticed a sharp rise recently in services making use of 3rd party cookies, though: FB connect and OAuth generally, and all of Google's stuff (I use a separate browser to stay logged into gmail and calendar so that I'm not logged in as far as Google is concerned for my normal browsing).

What about having sandboxed browser instances which segment off your various web apps in their own little silos?

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