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Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

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Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#111

Post by mike-cardwell »

yegg wrote: post #10
antr wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just read Gabriel's post, and I pretty much agree (and do) with what he says. Due to these shared believes I've been using DDG quite a bit, I even deleted the Google search app from my phone, and instead been using DDG's iOS app as my default mobile search engine. However, every time I use DDG it hurts a bit. The quality of the results are very far behind from that of Google's. I many times end up doing a Google se…

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 use DuckDuckGo for searching for products which I want to buy, because this is always what happens.

I suspect DuckDuckGo is a much better search experience for people inside the US than outside.

EDIT: Ooh. I've just noticed that if I set my region to "UK" in DuckDuckGo the results suddenly become far more relevant. Why isn't this set by default? Not only am I coming from a UK IP address, but my browser is sending "Accept-Language: en-gb"

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#112

Post by overdrivetg »

stcredzero wrote: post #93
zipperhead wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Are there any utilities for management of the hosts file?

Gas Mask on OSX: http://clockwise.ee/

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#113

Post by mikerichards »

Retra wrote: post #102
mikerichards wrote: post #82

Obama's natural inclination is to never to "regulate" the power of government, but to regulate industry. Government's intrusion of our privacy is the much bigger problem, but Obama just says "look over there at those big internet companies, forget about the NSA, CIA, IRS and other numerous government agencies and unaccountable bureaucrats that want to snoop into and control your private lives. Forget that the governm…

Obama is not a member of congress. He doesn't write laws or regulations.

The first sentence of the post.

Any day now President Obama is going to propose a new privacy bill of rights that will give you much more control over your personal information.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/online-privacy-bill-wh...

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#114

Post by TaylorAlexander »

saraid216 wrote: post #85
rom16384 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That isn't really different from Google, though, is it?

So... two poorly designed sites?

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#115

Post by cheatsheet »

Retra wrote: post #97
cheatsheet wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's fine, but your reason seems suspicious. I prefer to avoid living my life in a fishbowl. > provably private This does not have a mathematics definition. Private means not accessible to anyone aside from the owner. That is something that is provably private. > information theoretic guarantee This sounds like hand waving to get rid of actual concerns.

If you think privacy is "power over what others perceive", then you are being selfish and short-sighted in a way that prevents mutual privacy, and is thus generally untenable.

That would be fine, if the 'people who perceive' would realize perception is much more variant and undecidable than 'people who perceive' acknowledge.

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#116

Post by valente »

yegg wrote: post #10
antr wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just read Gabriel's post, and I pretty much agree (and do) with what he says. Due to these shared believes I've been using DDG quite a bit, I even deleted the Google search app from my phone, and instead been using DDG's iOS app as my default mobile search engine. However, every time I use DDG it hurts a bit. The quality of the results are very far behind from that of Google's. I many times end up doing a Google se…

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

Huge fan of DDG, but overseas speed is a problem for me. I find DDG amazing in the States, but when I'm in Australia the extra tiny bit of latency can be frustrating (in the most First World Problem kind of way, of course).

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#117

Post by sparaker »

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 hope i don't see very irrelevant results again cause i might not return again if it fails again.

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#118

Post by stcredzero »

murbard2 wrote: post #105
stcredzero wrote: post #100

Pretty much all technologies have facets where markets break down and require some form of corrective regulation to make things work the way we want them to. No! Nooooooo! Say it isn't so! The market is a magical infallible oracle of laissez-faire goodness! (That snidely said, the market is absolutely a marvellous thing in precisely the contexts where situations are so complex that centralized control is hopeless and…

In which category do you think the question of how privacy should be managed between websites and their customers, across all kind of business models, all types of customers, and all sorts of data fit? A complex situation that needs context aware distributed decision, or a problem simple enough that regulation can unambiguously help?

Of course, there are actually a great number of questions, not just one. One of the biggest problems is that there is not enough knowledge in general society yet for markets to work well enough wrt privacy. One thing that lawmakers should be keenly aware of, is that broadly written regulations can be helpful at first, but then become burdensome in a mature market or in the face of technological change.

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#119

Post by duaneb »

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…

Well, it's very unusual in this day for a company to proactively protect your privacy. Whether they actually do is unknowable without encryption.

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#120

Post by warfangle »

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…

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 browser fingerprinting, but I don't see any evidence of that either.

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