Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

torrentfreak.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 475 posts

Re: DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

#171

Post by robbrown451 »

autoexec wrote: post #139
derevaunseraun wrote: post #73

Question: does anyone actually know what DDG does with user data? Like they market themselves as a "privacy respecting" search engine, but how much of this is truth? I'd imagine there's good money in convincing people they have privacy because then they'll provide more interesting data. Has the company ever been audited? Why should they be trusted to not compromise user privacy? Imo at least Google is honest: you kno…

Here's my take: Duckduckgo could easily be fully owned and operated by some three letter agency. The NSA is already able to go onsite and tap into the data that passes through corporations and they've been doing exactly that for decades (see Room 641A) and they can force corporations to keep silent about it using national security letters. You should already assume that every US based company is sending every scrap o…

> The worst case scenario would be that Duckduckgo is actually secretly run by Google and the data being collecting from the service is being used to help fill your dossier at Google but if that's the case we're never going to know about it until a whistleblower comes forward.

The problem with this (and most other conspiratorial thinking) is that of course a whistleblower is going to come forward.

Are you thinking that every employee of DuckDuckGo that knows this (and many would have to), is paid so highly as to just be quiet? That not one of them thinks, "hey, it would be fun to be famous? It would be fun to expose this thing that is suddenly going to make me a hero to millions? I could write a book about it afterwards and make a ton of money..."

And of course, Google would consider this in the first place. Like "maybe this isn't a great idea, because secrets like that are hard to keep? And maybe this could destroy our company and that kind of risk isn't a great idea?"

Re: DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

#172

Post by maxk42 »

mdaniel wrote: post #2

As for the YouTube-DL part specifically, I'm pretty sure that's a side-effect of them being dependent upon Bing for the actual index: https://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Ayoutube-dl.org Also, _come on_; if someone gives up after one search term, which also includes advanced site-restricting syntax, there's no way they'd be able to operate youtube-dl anyway: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=youtube-dl&ia=web

They don't rely solely on Bing. If a popular site doesn't appear, it's definitely a conscious decision on their part.

Re: DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

#173

Post by z3c0 »

zodzedzi wrote: post #167
z3c0 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm still misunderstanding, but when configuring the domain in the custom settings, it does allow you to limit the custom rules to only the site you're currently on, via the "Enable these capabilities when top page matches" dropdown. The default is "ANY SITE".

I don't see any of these options in my plugin. I have NoScript 10, and it looks like there is a NoScript 11 out there; is that what you have? Maybe the feature was introduced in 11 and I'm missing that update; checking their changelog now... Edit: Correction - I do have NoScript 11; but don't see those options.

I think you nailed it - I am indeed on 11. So good news! It looks like NoScript is attentive to user needs.

Edit: seeing your edit - the plot thickens. I'm on 11.4.4 - any difference there?

Re: DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

#174

Post by GekkePrutser »

autoexec wrote: post #139
derevaunseraun wrote: post #73

Question: does anyone actually know what DDG does with user data? Like they market themselves as a "privacy respecting" search engine, but how much of this is truth? I'd imagine there's good money in convincing people they have privacy because then they'll provide more interesting data. Has the company ever been audited? Why should they be trusted to not compromise user privacy? Imo at least Google is honest: you kno…

Here's my take: Duckduckgo could easily be fully owned and operated by some three letter agency. The NSA is already able to go onsite and tap into the data that passes through corporations and they've been doing exactly that for decades (see Room 641A) and they can force corporations to keep silent about it using national security letters. You should already assume that every US based company is sending every scrap o…

DuckDuckGo was never meant to defeat spying by three-letter-agencies.

It's meant to protect us from tracking by advertisers.

I don't think it makes any sense for a three-letter-agency to run it. They can just NSL duckduckgo. They obey the law, as this news item shows clearly.

Re: DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

#175

Post by zodzedzi »

z3c0 wrote: post #173
zodzedzi wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see any of these options in my plugin. I have NoScript 10, and it looks like there is a NoScript 11 out there; is that what you have? Maybe the feature was introduced in 11 and I'm missing that update; checking their changelog now... Edit: Correction - I do have NoScript 11; but don't see those options.

I think you nailed it - I am indeed on 11. So good news! It looks like NoScript is attentive to user needs. Edit: seeing your edit - the plot thickens. I'm on 11.4.4 - any difference there?

I had 11.2.11.

And you're right, according to their changelog [1], they added it in 11.3.

>> v 11.3rc1 + Contextual policies (different capabilities for the same origin, depending on the top-level domain) configurable in the CUSTOM panel (thanks NLnet for financial support)

Woohoo!

Thanks for following up and making me look, I now have a better setup!

[1] https://noscript.net/changelog/

Re: DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

#176

Post by jeffbee »

derevaunseraun wrote: post #73

Question: does anyone actually know what DDG does with user data? Like they market themselves as a "privacy respecting" search engine, but how much of this is truth? I'd imagine there's good money in convincing people they have privacy because then they'll provide more interesting data. Has the company ever been audited? Why should they be trusted to not compromise user privacy? Imo at least Google is honest: you kno…

You're right to be skeptical. They are essentially a client state of Microsoft. Their results come from Bing and they are hosted at Azure. Their privacy policy is just vague enough to not rule out the possibility that Microsoft collects all the stuff that DDG says they don't collect.

Re: DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

#177

Post by moffkalast »

colordrops wrote: post #161
derevaunseraun wrote: post #73

Question: does anyone actually know what DDG does with user data? Like they market themselves as a "privacy respecting" search engine, but how much of this is truth? I'd imagine there's good money in convincing people they have privacy because then they'll provide more interesting data. Has the company ever been audited? Why should they be trusted to not compromise user privacy? Imo at least Google is honest: you kno…

I used them nearly exclusively and recommended them to all my friends. Once they started censoring content for political reasons (Ukraine), that ended instantly.

I've always been a bit suspicious that despite having seemingly no way of making revenue they manage to plaster every corner of the internet with their paid ads. Like, aren't they supposed to be a damn nonprofit or something? Makes absolutely no sense.

Re: DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

#178

Post by mastazi »

colordrops wrote: post #161
derevaunseraun wrote: post #73

Question: does anyone actually know what DDG does with user data? Like they market themselves as a "privacy respecting" search engine, but how much of this is truth? I'd imagine there's good money in convincing people they have privacy because then they'll provide more interesting data. Has the company ever been audited? Why should they be trusted to not compromise user privacy? Imo at least Google is honest: you kno…

I used them nearly exclusively and recommended them to all my friends. Once they started censoring content for political reasons (Ukraine), that ended instantly.

> censoring content for political reasons (Ukraine)

what type of content did they censor? Do you have a link with more info?

Re: DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

#179

Post by throwaway82652 »

derevaunseraun wrote: post #73

Question: does anyone actually know what DDG does with user data? Like they market themselves as a "privacy respecting" search engine, but how much of this is truth? I'd imagine there's good money in convincing people they have privacy because then they'll provide more interesting data. Has the company ever been audited? Why should they be trusted to not compromise user privacy? Imo at least Google is honest: you kno…

>since DDG isn't open source like searx, how do we know there is ANY truth to their marketing claims?

You wouldn't know this even if it was open source. Open source does nothing here. Looking at the source code will not tell you their data retention policies or what is actually stored in their databases. It will also not guarantee the source that you see matches what is on their servers.

Re: DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

#180

Post by einpoklum »

syshum wrote: post #154
dirtyv wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely do not trust Brave. I tried their browser on my iPhone for a few months. Always chose the most private settings, don't save history, etc, so whenever I opened the app there was no evidence it had even been used before. After one particular update, I started the app and it opened up literally dozens of tabs. Going through them I realized each tab was a site I had visited in the past. Left a nasty review o…

Brave was started by one of the Founders of Mozilla.

With respect to the Mozilla project (not so much to its current state) - that does not mean much. Different people were involved with it, and that was 25 years ago.
Post reply on HN