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Google _is_ a privacy threat. Completely unrelated to DDG, marketing or believe. One Google with thousand tentacles...
by chappi42 8y ago
Google _is_ a privacy threat. Completely unrelated to DDG, marketing or believe.
One Google with thousand tentacles...
- tramGG 8y agoA vote for Google is a vote for death.
- nolok 8y agoWhether it's true or not doesn't change anything to what the parent comment said.
- Aunche 8y agoI'm a bit uncomfortable with how much DDG's marketing is focused on trashing their competition. They deliberately obfuscate privacy issues to strengthen their narrative. Sure duckduckgo is a good company right now, but that's only because they're small. I doubt they'll stay that way when they capture a significant market share.
- anth_anm 8y agoWhy? That's the differentiator they chose to go for. You can argue that's it's dishonest, but i don't see the problem with the marketing.
- kiriakasis 8y agoPersonally I find their writing mean... I do not love the super optimistic marketing lingo, but DDG sometimes sounds too vicious in their blog. (I still use them as main search engine, but I am not sure I would like them to go mainstream)
- benatkin 8y agoReplace Google with Exxon and privacy with renewable energy, and you'll see why people aren't bothered by this slight against Google. Not all griping is equal. This isn't the same as putting another person down to lift yourself up, or putting another local small business down in order to lift yours up.
- Aunche 8y agoI don't pay attention to renewable energy marketing, but I don't think they attack Exxon as much as DDG attacks Google. I think a closer analogy is health food companies advertising that misrepresents the benefits of organic foods.
- wolco 8y agoI have never seen an organic food commericial. I haven't seen a fruit or vegetable commercial for years. I have seen products over labelled like the low carb steak or the sugarfree water. These products were always low carb or sugarfree. DDG attacking google tells us they are shooting for number 2. Attacking google provides free advertising. It also tells us if they get bigger they will double down on being different from google so the chance they will suddenly turn against privacy is unlikely. If it does happen funding is running out.
- LeifCarrotson 8y agoYeah, but in this analogy your favorite renewable energy company just announced one of their products is now produced by Chevron. Which is not Exxon and therefore, ostensibly, a huge win for renewables.
- eof 8y agoWell, they certainly can't compete on search quality.
- Ajax25 8y agoTrue
- notduncansmith 8y ago“Certainly”? I doubt the deservedness of that certainty. DDG satisfies most of my searches on the first go, and I’ve never had success with !g after a failed DDG query. Furthermore, the Google results has a cluttered design with sparse information, so it takes much longer to figure out that I haven’t found what I’m looking for. I’d say Google is the one failing to compete on search quality. At one point they did, but now Google’s consumer products compete on brand awareness and price, which they can only do because of their conquests in the advertising industry. Most people are not Google’s customer, they are part of Google’s enterprise product: the attention of people whose data profiles meet various requirements.
- wst_ 8y agoYes, certainly. DDG very often have quite okay results while Google has almost always outstanding results. I have to use !g quite often when searching for a programming or architecture solutions that are just slightly more complex than mainstream. I am using DDG mostly because I trust in the cause. OK, I admit that bangs are nice. That being said, both our comments are just an opinions. I'd gladly see a research about their accuracy.
- Wowfunhappy 8y agoRemember that "Bing it on" campaign Microsoft ran, to show that in a blind test, users couldn't tell the difference between Bing search results and Google search results? Well, Microsoft's test completely backfired on me. I ran the test many times. In most cases, one of the columns had clearly better results, and 80+% of the time, that column was Google. Small sample size to be sure, but it covers 100% of the population I care about in choosing a search engine (me). Granted, this was Bing, not Google, but I kind of doubt DDG would fare better. (And in non-blind tests, I definitely fell I'm getting the worst results from DDG).
- smokeyj 8y agoAs a DDG user I share your same skepticism. But I also believe that privacy will become a premium feature, even a symbol of status - similar to the iPhone/iMessage today. Poor people will buy devices that are subsidized with "targeted advertisements" and Facebook apps they can't uninstall. The premium market will pay to not deal with this nonsense.
- reificator 8y ago> The premium market will pay to not deal with this nonsense. And thus stand out for targeting purposes regardless.
- smokeyj 8y agoTargeting works the more data you have. You could target “well off iOS user” but that’s less invasive than “searched topics of adoption and abortion. Recommend local abortion clinics”. Ya see what I’m getting at here?
- reificator 8y agoIf you have few enough users on a given platform, they tend to be identifiable by being so unique. If there's one user who logs in from Chrome in Incognito on an iPhone X via a VPN in North Korea, it's not too hard to fingerprint them, if you're looking for it if course...
- latexr 8y ago> Sure duckduckgo is a good company right now, but that's only because they're small. Only because they are small? That seems to imply that if they ever get big, they’ll no doubt become evil, privacy-wise. Apple proves that does not have to be the case.
- setr 8y agoApple’s main business is hardware, and software that helps sell the hardware. Any revenue from data is likely a seperate, minor stream; and for it to become a significant one, likely requires significant changes in Apple’s operations. Like any other hardware company, they don’t need google’s kind of data collection to make money. But DDG is primarily funded by search, and the search business is funded by ads, which are more valuable based on targetting quality, which is improved by... data. About the unique user, specifically. For DDG to grow while maintaining search as it’s primary business, it’s difficult to imagine them not eventually (or at least, being heavily incentivized to) approach/mimic google-style of data collection — because data collection is their money maker. Apple is unique amongst FAANG in being non-data-reliant, from the start; they never had strong incentives to turn to it, and took the opportunity to stand against it, improving their primary business without any immediate loss (they’re hit by opportunity cost for it, but otherwise).
- latexr 8y agoI don’t disagree that DDG might turn evil. What I disagree with is the premise that they are not evil only because they are small.
- aeontech 8y agoApple's Services revenue hit 10 billion per quarter in the last earnings report, and it's growing steadily. Yeah, it doesn't compare to hardware sales, but I don't think it can be called a minor insignificant stream any more, can it?
- setr 8y agoWhat does services actually consist of? From [1], it looks like the major components are the app store, iTunes/Music (purchases, I assume) and the iCloud? I'm not seeing the data dependency that would incentivize Apple to look to Google for advice, at least not in this category. The closest might be recommendation systems, but afaik even Netflix only collects from its own information pools, and the main chunk of it is probably for their custom shows; Amazon definitely doesn't track that much data about their users, because their recommendation system might actually be useful if it did. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Apple_Inc._services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Apple_Inc._services
- rising-sky 8y ago> Sure duckduckgo is a good company right now, but that's only because they're small Is this opinion or fact?
- 2bitencryption 8y ago> when they capture a significant market share. but they haven't built a better mousetrap, and they're up against the greatest mousetrap ever known to mankind
- dmix 8y agoPlus they could easily survive for decades fulfilling only the niche market who cares about privacy. They may never need to be the "big fish", which will involve compromising their users security, and therefore lose a lot of their value proposition. Even having 1-5% of the search market is a pretty great business. Not everyone needs to be Google-scale to be a success.
- acct1771 8y agoEh...Google even 5 years ago was 10x more useful to me than they are now. No exaggeration. Even Search has become markedly less useful, a common story around here, to the point where even nonbubbled proxied Startpage.com searches are disappointing. Maps becomes less reliable all the time from a user perspective (in my immediate region, to cover my ass I guess). Chromecast and YouTube, in general and in conjunction, have become...bloated, buggy, user-tracking-first embarrassments of their original versions...don't get me started on Gmail.... if you're gonna take all my info, at least be good at your services. Especially the ones I pay for.
- choicenotchance 8y agoWhat the hell have you been smoking? All those products are good except YouTube, which actually could use a rewrite.
- rusk 8y agoI remember there was a time when googling was so intelligent it seemed like it was going to become self aware! Dunno what happened along the way but the last few years it’s like a giantfairly sophisticated grep coupled with a bunch of sponsored links.
- 8y ago
- g105b 8y agoLike when Google were little and their actual tagline was "Do No Evil".
- ringshall 8y agoThe tag line was actually « Don’t be evil ». It was never an official motto afaik.
- lostlogin 8y agoYou’ve reminded me of Apple’s adverts at the beginning of the 2nd coming - the Mac guy and the PC guy. When you’re deeply in the underdog position I think that style is ok, but at a certain point it becomes a bit gross.
- Ajax25 8y agoYeah, but so is about anything else. Google doesn't share that information, that's a huge principle of their company. Also, DDG is small, so it can be easily exploited.
- GeekyBear 8y agoWhen Google announced to their advertising customers that they were buying everyone's credit card data, that was my own personal bridge too far. >Google has been able to track your location using Google Maps for a long time. Since 2014, it has used that information to provide advertisers with information on how often people visit their stores. But store visits aren’t purchases, so, as Google said in a blog post on its new service for marketers, it has partnered with “third parties” that give them access to 70 percent of all credit and debit card purchases. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607938/google-now-tracks-your-credit-card-purchases-and-connects-them-to-its-online-profile-of-you/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607938/google-now-tracks-... Perhaps other search engines will reach this extreme level of creepy behavior in the future, but Google is there today.
- ehsankia 8y agoThat's a very misleading way of putting it. From your own article: > In addition, Google does not know what products people bought.
- GeekyBear 8y agoOf course not. Whose credit card statement includes a listing of the individual items you purchased at a store during a particular transaction?
- bduerst 8y agoIt's not in the statements that you received, it's a reciprocity agreement between retailers and CC companies to share the data by CC # For example, CC companies could give you your itemized purchase history for Macy's on your statement, if they wanted to.
- londons_explore 8y agoIt is my understanding that most stores do not share that data, because they feel it is a significant commercial advantage. Credit card companies have wanted itemized transactions for aaages (it's even part of the protocols they use) for fraud prevention, but very few merchants have agreed.
- PunchTornado 8y agoyeah, but they wouldn't be switching from openstreetmap to apple maps if they cared about privacy.