6 ms·

DuckDuckGo Proposes the “Do-Not-Track Act of 2019”

139 points by chdaniel 7y ago

trpc 7y ago
They should rename it to "Do-Not-Track-Just-Inject-Ads-Based-On-Keywords" act
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Then we can get back to a form of advertising most would find acceptable. Might be tough persuading everyone to turn off adblocking even it became law.
- nisuni 7y ago
  From my perspective (user of search engines) I find this business model much more acceptable.
- ignoramous 7y ago
  Notably, https://startpage.com https://startpage.com proxies non-personalized Google results and monetizes using non-tracking keyword-based ads.
bArray 7y ago
I have DoNotTrack set and my browser blocked several tracking scripts from their site. As for the problem, it really comes down to making money: Data is sold to inform targeted adverts. An additional requirement is that the ad company needs to know how much to pay the ad host. Also remember that ad blockers came about mostly as a result of reducing web bloat and reducing the fight for the users attention. Nobody in their right mind would agree to this without some sensible solution in place. Servers cost money to run and content is usually not free to create.
- icebraining 7y ago
  Newspapers and radio and TV and billboards and flyers managed to have ads without reporting back detailed info about the people viewing them. The problem is that once some are tracking, the non-tracking become less profitable, leading everyone to track. But if nobody can track...
  - ilovetux 7y ago
    I mean, true enough, but DDG has since proven that non-tracking ads can be profitable even in an industry dominated by nosey advertisers. The trick I think is to look at whether or not you're profitable not if you are the most profitable company in your sector. To be honest I would be happier running a company which made $1,000,000 per year profit than a company which had to race to make more and more profits each year. That's the rub, though, if you have investors you need to keep growing and at some point growth requires you to abandon even the most basic pretense of ethical behavior.
- EnderViaAnsible 7y ago
  The sensible solution, I think, is requiring digital advertisers to support non-personalized ads as a fallback for tracking ads; that is, a digital advertiser would not be allowed to only offer personalized ads. Then allow content creators right of refusal for those consumers who don't wish to allow any advertising at all, and build software supporting this into major browsers. Supplement with things like Brace's Basic Attention Tokens and premium subscriptions. Will people just make ad free browsers elsewhere that don't respect this? Yes, of course. But hopefully these will be few or niché, as even now many users do not mind personalized tracking and many don't want to move to a new browser. And yes, content has to to be paid for. If content creators do not want to work for free, let them find alternate revenue streams or cease creating. (And the second is an option.) The alternative is tantamount to saying creators or their paymasters have a right to personally track me simply because they created content that I happened upon, and it's the de facto situation right now, albeit with a vigorous arms race of advertisers and ad blockers.
  - nebulaserfer 7y ago
    Content doesn’t have to be payed by obtrusive ads and user tracking. Many articles wrote just for the sake of writing or as an additional marketing channel (digital ocean articles how to setup servers, basecamp blog and so on). I don’t want to read the content created with incentive to sell me to advertisers. The quality of such content is also questionable.
- criddell 7y ago
  > Data is sold to inform targeted adverts That's the part that needs to go away. I think the original version of Google had the right idea. The content of the page determines the ads. Billions of dollars that have been spent on brilliant engineers, bandwidth, and CPU cycles to improve ad targeting by a fraction of a percent here and another fraction there. I can't help but feel like the big winners in the web of the past two decades are ad companies and not creators. Even the term content creator points to this. Ads are what is important and the stuff they go around is just content. We've devalued creative work to the point of absurdity.
  - manigandham 7y ago
    It's not fractions of a percent. It's massive increases which is why FB and Google are two of the most valuable companies on the planet. They have 1st-party access to user profiles which is why they're so good compared to independent parties which use more anonymous profiles. This is why 3rd-party audience data is poor and will get poorer while Google and Facebook will be more entrenched because of GDPR and similar laws. So there will be a move to context for some ads, but not most of the ones you see.
    - username223 7y ago
      > It's not fractions of a percent. It's massive increases Do you know a number on the difference between targeted and untargeted search (not display) ads? If I search for "instant pot," I'm probably looking to buy an instant pot. How much does knowing my entire search and browsing history help the advertiser? I'm sure Google has these numbers, and equally sure they aren't sharing. It looks like there may be big differences for display ads (2-3x?), but for search?
      - manigandham 7y ago
        Yes things are different with search ads. What you're describing is called "intent" and there's nothing more clear than what you query, although it can and does get boosted by history. I didn't think this discussion was limited to just search though.
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
  >> Servers cost money to run and content is usually not free to create. Yes- and you know who makes a lot of money out of servers and content? ISPs. If they want to keep making that money, perhaps they can fork out some of it to cover the costs of running the infrastructure and the content that keeps them in the money.
  - cmpolis 7y ago
    I don't want my ISP determining which content and infrastructure to funded; that seems like an even more broken model.
    - y4mi 7y ago
      At first I agreed, but it might actually be a good idea if the payment is enforced. Imagine a scheme in which any traffic has to be bought/paid by the ISP, which is financed by your monthly subscription. So if you open an url, you're gonna have to pay a tiny amount for the request. But it's probably too easy to game. Just write a malware that keeps downloading from your servers. It would make hijacked chrome extensions insanely profitable. And just imagine the money Mirai's Creator could've gotten with this... It would also make bigger websites more profitable than lean and clean pages. So I guess you're right. Not a good idea. It would be cool if it worked though. sometimes I wish capitalism wouldn't pervert any system at the cost of society. Too bad there aren't any alternatives that actually seem to work.
      - BuckRogers 7y ago
        > It would be cool if it worked though. sometimes I wish capitalism wouldn't pervert any system at the cost of society. Too bad there aren't any alternatives that actually seem to work. Only if you adopt the mainstream, incorrect definition of what capitalism is. To put the correct definition into laymen terms, capitalism is essentially paying someone less than the value that they produce. A privately-held and operated Ponzi scheme with nearly everyone on the bottom. That's what all the talk about "mode of production" is about. The term does not hold exclusive domain on profit or enterprise. There were markets under feudalism. To address your second point, there are plenty of alternatives that work. There's even one that's currently showing itself as being outright superior. Look into worker owned cooperatives such as Mondragon in Spain. Both Microsoft and GE have sent representatives there to figure out why their quality level is so high and so consistent.
- quest88 7y ago
  Why would a company sell their most important resource? They let advertisers specify a Target user but they don't sell their own data afaik, right?
- wdr1 7y ago
  > As for the problem, it really comes down to making money: Data is sold to inform targeted adverts. If it came down to simply targeting, the original DNT proposal would have succeeded. If someone cares enough about not seeing targeted ads that they're willing to opt-in for this setting, then probably not much value in targeting that way anyway. The issue came down to things like measurement, ad spam & the rest. Basically things that involve tracking but not targeting. The advertising side wanted to still allow these things if DNT was set, but there were vocal voices saying DNT must be strict & not allow those tracking cases either.
threeseed 7y ago
Pretty much the low hanging fruit of PR efforts. Propose a legislation that has zero chance of ever coming into effect and then watch as all of your target audience pat you on the back for all the great work. Problem of course is that this isn't how legislation gets passed in the US. Especially these days when you have Democrats, Republicans and the President all with completely different stances on privacy. And of course a 2020 election with a President who is relying almost exclusively on digital marketing and would be hurt by this legislation. If this was a SuperPAC with a high profile lobbying firm then you could take all of this a little more seriously.
- rvnx 7y ago
  In the meantime DDG makes almost 100% of its money from tracking users via revenue sharing agreement with Yahoo/Microsoft and Amazon.
  - user17843 7y ago
    Indeed, no one talks about the privacy implications of referral links, although when it comes to the agreement with Bing, etc., I think everything is proxied. Not so much with the direct links to Amazon. Amazon knows when you are a DDG user. Even though affiliate links are a low hanging fruit in regards to making money with search engines, it is not made transparent by DuckDuckGo. They also use all the data they can get, they just tell us they get rid of the identifying information as fast as possible (IP address). I wouldn't be surprised if, from a privacy-standpoint, using Google and DDG as a non-logged in user is basically the same, especially if you use google with an ad blocker. The process of Google ads is basically to have a profile based on cookie data, which the user can easily control.
    - rvnx 7y ago
      yegg (CEO @ DDG): "We've actually been using Yahoo technology along with our own and others since the very beginning of DuckDuckGo. Over the past year though we've been working on a stronger partnership with Yahoo so we can get access to more features like date filters that everyone has been asking for (that one in particular is our most requested feature by far). With regards to the ads, nothing is changing in terms of ad privacy/tracking or our privacy policy in general. Ads should just become more relevant." Have you noticed "improving.duckduckgo.com", the analytics service that logs all requests ? "To be clear, this means we cannot ever tell what individual people are doing since everyone is anonymous" Oh, except the IP address, right. Fun fact (experiment now removed): https://web.archive.org/web/20180910042004im_/http://image.bayimg.com/oaebkaaed.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20180910042004im_/http://image.b...
hkai 7y ago
Great way to promote themselves. DDG is growing like crazy, although I had to switch back to Google after half a year with DDG because search quality is nowhere near that good. On the other hand, the Democratic Party seems eager to stick it to the Silicon Valley, so they may at least use a similar proposal as a way to negotiate with the big tech.
- seba_dos1 7y ago
  FWIW, somewhere in the past year I stopped fallbacking to Google at all. I can't remember when I used "!g" bang the last time; it has improved a lot.
user17843 7y ago
I rather want to see the "Duck-Not-Track Act", as DDG has a complete "data survaillance" system built into their product.
- oddly 7y ago
  Can you supply some more information on this?
  - user17843 7y ago
    It was a cynical way of critizing that they collect so-called anonymized usage data, for example for people who really need something anonymous they could start offering a gateway to a search that doesn't collect anything at all. https://help.duckduckgo.com/privacy/atb/?redir=1 https://help.duckduckgo.com/privacy/atb/?redir=1
    - doorbellguy 7y ago
      What is your search engine of personal choice?
      - user17843 7y ago
        I have split up my browsing and search among multiple browsers, depending on the use case, and I use Bing, Google, DuckDuckGo and Startpage, mostly for having different perspectives as I found out that only using google limited the stuff I found. (Google serves Startpages different results than what they show themselves)
      - jchook 7y ago
        Qwant.com produces far better results than DDG in my experience.
        user17843 7y ago
        and they have a nice lite search: https://lite.qwant.com/ https://lite.qwant.com/
smitop 7y ago
It seems weird that they would ask survey respondents to check their browser settings to determine if they had Do Not Track enabled. DNT status is transmitted over HTTP headers, and is available to JavaScript. Couldn't they have just checked DNT status automatically to get more accurate data?

139 points by chdaniel 7y ago

trpc 7y ago

They should rename it to "Do-Not-Track-Just-Inject-Ads-Based-On-Keywords" act

NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Then we can get back to a form of advertising most would find acceptable. Might be tough persuading everyone to turn off adblocking even it became law.
nisuni 7y ago
From my perspective (user of search engines) I find this business model much more acceptable.
ignoramous 7y ago
Notably, https://startpage.com https://startpage.com proxies non-personalized Google results and monetizes using non-tracking keyword-based ads.

bArray 7y ago

I have DoNotTrack set and my browser blocked several tracking scripts from their site. As for the problem, it really comes down to making money: Data is sold to inform targeted adverts. An additional requirement is that the ad company needs to know how much to pay the ad host. Also remember that ad blockers came about mostly as a result of reducing web bloat and reducing the fight for the users attention. Nobody in their right mind would agree to this without some sensible solution in place. Servers cost money to run and content is usually not free to create.

icebraining 7y ago
Newspapers and radio and TV and billboards and flyers managed to have ads without reporting back detailed info about the people viewing them. The problem is that once some are tracking, the non-tracking become less profitable, leading everyone to track. But if nobody can track...
- ilovetux 7y ago
  I mean, true enough, but DDG has since proven that non-tracking ads can be profitable even in an industry dominated by nosey advertisers. The trick I think is to look at whether or not you're profitable not if you are the most profitable company in your sector. To be honest I would be happier running a company which made $1,000,000 per year profit than a company which had to race to make more and more profits each year. That's the rub, though, if you have investors you need to keep growing and at some point growth requires you to abandon even the most basic pretense of ethical behavior.
EnderViaAnsible 7y ago
The sensible solution, I think, is requiring digital advertisers to support non-personalized ads as a fallback for tracking ads; that is, a digital advertiser would not be allowed to only offer personalized ads. Then allow content creators right of refusal for those consumers who don't wish to allow any advertising at all, and build software supporting this into major browsers. Supplement with things like Brace's Basic Attention Tokens and premium subscriptions. Will people just make ad free browsers elsewhere that don't respect this? Yes, of course. But hopefully these will be few or niché, as even now many users do not mind personalized tracking and many don't want to move to a new browser. And yes, content has to to be paid for. If content creators do not want to work for free, let them find alternate revenue streams or cease creating. (And the second is an option.) The alternative is tantamount to saying creators or their paymasters have a right to personally track me simply because they created content that I happened upon, and it's the de facto situation right now, albeit with a vigorous arms race of advertisers and ad blockers.
- nebulaserfer 7y ago
  Content doesn’t have to be payed by obtrusive ads and user tracking. Many articles wrote just for the sake of writing or as an additional marketing channel (digital ocean articles how to setup servers, basecamp blog and so on). I don’t want to read the content created with incentive to sell me to advertisers. The quality of such content is also questionable.
criddell 7y ago
> Data is sold to inform targeted adverts That's the part that needs to go away. I think the original version of Google had the right idea. The content of the page determines the ads. Billions of dollars that have been spent on brilliant engineers, bandwidth, and CPU cycles to improve ad targeting by a fraction of a percent here and another fraction there. I can't help but feel like the big winners in the web of the past two decades are ad companies and not creators. Even the term content creator points to this. Ads are what is important and the stuff they go around is just content. We've devalued creative work to the point of absurdity.
- manigandham 7y ago
  It's not fractions of a percent. It's massive increases which is why FB and Google are two of the most valuable companies on the planet. They have 1st-party access to user profiles which is why they're so good compared to independent parties which use more anonymous profiles. This is why 3rd-party audience data is poor and will get poorer while Google and Facebook will be more entrenched because of GDPR and similar laws. So there will be a move to context for some ads, but not most of the ones you see.
  - username223 7y ago
    > It's not fractions of a percent. It's massive increases Do you know a number on the difference between targeted and untargeted search (not display) ads? If I search for "instant pot," I'm probably looking to buy an instant pot. How much does knowing my entire search and browsing history help the advertiser? I'm sure Google has these numbers, and equally sure they aren't sharing. It looks like there may be big differences for display ads (2-3x?), but for search?
    - manigandham 7y ago
      Yes things are different with search ads. What you're describing is called "intent" and there's nothing more clear than what you query, although it can and does get boosted by history. I didn't think this discussion was limited to just search though.
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
>> Servers cost money to run and content is usually not free to create. Yes- and you know who makes a lot of money out of servers and content? ISPs. If they want to keep making that money, perhaps they can fork out some of it to cover the costs of running the infrastructure and the content that keeps them in the money.
- cmpolis 7y ago
  I don't want my ISP determining which content and infrastructure to funded; that seems like an even more broken model.
  - y4mi 7y ago
    At first I agreed, but it might actually be a good idea if the payment is enforced. Imagine a scheme in which any traffic has to be bought/paid by the ISP, which is financed by your monthly subscription. So if you open an url, you're gonna have to pay a tiny amount for the request. But it's probably too easy to game. Just write a malware that keeps downloading from your servers. It would make hijacked chrome extensions insanely profitable. And just imagine the money Mirai's Creator could've gotten with this... It would also make bigger websites more profitable than lean and clean pages. So I guess you're right. Not a good idea. It would be cool if it worked though. sometimes I wish capitalism wouldn't pervert any system at the cost of society. Too bad there aren't any alternatives that actually seem to work.
    - BuckRogers 7y ago
      > It would be cool if it worked though. sometimes I wish capitalism wouldn't pervert any system at the cost of society. Too bad there aren't any alternatives that actually seem to work. Only if you adopt the mainstream, incorrect definition of what capitalism is. To put the correct definition into laymen terms, capitalism is essentially paying someone less than the value that they produce. A privately-held and operated Ponzi scheme with nearly everyone on the bottom. That's what all the talk about "mode of production" is about. The term does not hold exclusive domain on profit or enterprise. There were markets under feudalism. To address your second point, there are plenty of alternatives that work. There's even one that's currently showing itself as being outright superior. Look into worker owned cooperatives such as Mondragon in Spain. Both Microsoft and GE have sent representatives there to figure out why their quality level is so high and so consistent.
quest88 7y ago
Why would a company sell their most important resource? They let advertisers specify a Target user but they don't sell their own data afaik, right?
wdr1 7y ago
> As for the problem, it really comes down to making money: Data is sold to inform targeted adverts. If it came down to simply targeting, the original DNT proposal would have succeeded. If someone cares enough about not seeing targeted ads that they're willing to opt-in for this setting, then probably not much value in targeting that way anyway. The issue came down to things like measurement, ad spam & the rest. Basically things that involve tracking but not targeting. The advertising side wanted to still allow these things if DNT was set, but there were vocal voices saying DNT must be strict & not allow those tracking cases either.

threeseed 7y ago

Pretty much the low hanging fruit of PR efforts. Propose a legislation that has zero chance of ever coming into effect and then watch as all of your target audience pat you on the back for all the great work. Problem of course is that this isn't how legislation gets passed in the US. Especially these days when you have Democrats, Republicans and the President all with completely different stances on privacy. And of course a 2020 election with a President who is relying almost exclusively on digital marketing and would be hurt by this legislation. If this was a SuperPAC with a high profile lobbying firm then you could take all of this a little more seriously.

rvnx 7y ago
In the meantime DDG makes almost 100% of its money from tracking users via revenue sharing agreement with Yahoo/Microsoft and Amazon.
- user17843 7y ago
  Indeed, no one talks about the privacy implications of referral links, although when it comes to the agreement with Bing, etc., I think everything is proxied. Not so much with the direct links to Amazon. Amazon knows when you are a DDG user. Even though affiliate links are a low hanging fruit in regards to making money with search engines, it is not made transparent by DuckDuckGo. They also use all the data they can get, they just tell us they get rid of the identifying information as fast as possible (IP address). I wouldn't be surprised if, from a privacy-standpoint, using Google and DDG as a non-logged in user is basically the same, especially if you use google with an ad blocker. The process of Google ads is basically to have a profile based on cookie data, which the user can easily control.
  - rvnx 7y ago
    yegg (CEO @ DDG): "We've actually been using Yahoo technology along with our own and others since the very beginning of DuckDuckGo. Over the past year though we've been working on a stronger partnership with Yahoo so we can get access to more features like date filters that everyone has been asking for (that one in particular is our most requested feature by far). With regards to the ads, nothing is changing in terms of ad privacy/tracking or our privacy policy in general. Ads should just become more relevant." Have you noticed "improving.duckduckgo.com", the analytics service that logs all requests ? "To be clear, this means we cannot ever tell what individual people are doing since everyone is anonymous" Oh, except the IP address, right. Fun fact (experiment now removed): https://web.archive.org/web/20180910042004im_/http://image.bayimg.com/oaebkaaed.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20180910042004im_/http://image.b...

hkai 7y ago

Great way to promote themselves. DDG is growing like crazy, although I had to switch back to Google after half a year with DDG because search quality is nowhere near that good. On the other hand, the Democratic Party seems eager to stick it to the Silicon Valley, so they may at least use a similar proposal as a way to negotiate with the big tech.

seba_dos1 7y ago
FWIW, somewhere in the past year I stopped fallbacking to Google at all. I can't remember when I used "!g" bang the last time; it has improved a lot.

user17843 7y ago

I rather want to see the "Duck-Not-Track Act", as DDG has a complete "data survaillance" system built into their product.

oddly 7y ago
Can you supply some more information on this?
- user17843 7y ago
  It was a cynical way of critizing that they collect so-called anonymized usage data, for example for people who really need something anonymous they could start offering a gateway to a search that doesn't collect anything at all. https://help.duckduckgo.com/privacy/atb/?redir=1 https://help.duckduckgo.com/privacy/atb/?redir=1
  - doorbellguy 7y ago
    What is your search engine of personal choice?
    - user17843 7y ago
      I have split up my browsing and search among multiple browsers, depending on the use case, and I use Bing, Google, DuckDuckGo and Startpage, mostly for having different perspectives as I found out that only using google limited the stuff I found. (Google serves Startpages different results than what they show themselves)
    - jchook 7y ago
      Qwant.com produces far better results than DDG in my experience.
      - user17843 7y ago
        and they have a nice lite search: https://lite.qwant.com/ https://lite.qwant.com/

smitop 7y ago

It seems weird that they would ask survey respondents to check their browser settings to determine if they had Do Not Track enabled. DNT status is transmitted over HTTP headers, and is available to JavaScript. Couldn't they have just checked DNT status automatically to get more accurate data?