4 ms·

A privacy-oriented search engine (as in, results without personalization) being hyped on a site called HackerNews? I'm shocked! What's next, HN commenters hypi

A privacy-oriented search engine (as in, results without personalization) being hyped on a site called HackerNews? I'm shocked! What's next, HN commenters hyping Tor and Signal?

bduerst 7y ago
Okay, but how do you know Duck Duck Go is privacy orientated? Duck Duck Go is: - A privately-owned, for-profit corporation based in the U.S. and subject to its laws - Closed source software that is not open to the open-source community - Not doing third party privacy or security audits to verify claims of privacy - Basically a reskin of Bing (and Yandex) search engines while trying to masquerade as one The social media (and HN) comments promoting it are nearing creepy levels considering there is nothing to back up it's claims of privacy. Throw in their online promotions across Quora and other sites and their privacy-oriented branding efforts are suspicious considering they don't back them up.
- rvnx 7y ago
  They will jump and say "no we have 300 hundreds sources and own index blabla" but in practice it's essentially a Yahoo reskin. Yahoo itself is running on top of Microsoft Bing which explains some similarities you have seen. DDG's official address even was duckduckgo-owned-server.yahoo.net When you click on ads, of course your IP and search query is sent to Verizon, and Microsoft. It's even directly sent by the client browser.
- input_sh 7y ago
  > Okay, but how do you know Duck Duck Go is privacy orientated? My privacy results are not different than yours (assuming we have the same region set up). Ads that are shown are purely context-based. There's no account to which my search data is tied to. My device makes no third-party connections when opening the results page. That's better than 95% of the web. Perfect is the enemy of good.
rvnx 7y ago
"privacy" Recommending DuckDuckGo is like recommending Ghostery for privacy. For now the chain looks like this: Amazon Web Services -> DuckDuckGo -> Yahoo -> Microsoft Privacy is not the more intermediaries you add, the more private you become. Same as adding a VPN or a proxy, you just become vulnerable to the proxy operator and all their intermediates and dependencies. And yes DuckDuckGo is tracking, for example, everything you buy on Amazon. They are Amazon Affiliates, and as part of how Amazon Affiliates work DuckDuckGo has access to the precise list of items that users bought. Yes, Cloudflare, NordVPN and DuckDuckGo and Brave and you have the perfect "privacy" setup. If you want to believe, then go ahead.
- robjan 7y ago
  As an Amazon Associate you have access to what items were bought in a transaction but not who bought them.

A privacy-oriented search engine (as in, results without personalization) being hyped on a site called HackerNews? I'm shocked! What's next, HN commenters hyping Tor and Signal?

bduerst 7y ago

Okay, but how do you know Duck Duck Go is privacy orientated? Duck Duck Go is: - A privately-owned, for-profit corporation based in the U.S. and subject to its laws - Closed source software that is not open to the open-source community - Not doing third party privacy or security audits to verify claims of privacy - Basically a reskin of Bing (and Yandex) search engines while trying to masquerade as one The social media (and HN) comments promoting it are nearing creepy levels considering there is nothing to back up it's claims of privacy. Throw in their online promotions across Quora and other sites and their privacy-oriented branding efforts are suspicious considering they don't back them up.

rvnx 7y ago
They will jump and say "no we have 300 hundreds sources and own index blabla" but in practice it's essentially a Yahoo reskin. Yahoo itself is running on top of Microsoft Bing which explains some similarities you have seen. DDG's official address even was duckduckgo-owned-server.yahoo.net When you click on ads, of course your IP and search query is sent to Verizon, and Microsoft. It's even directly sent by the client browser.
input_sh 7y ago
> Okay, but how do you know Duck Duck Go is privacy orientated? My privacy results are not different than yours (assuming we have the same region set up). Ads that are shown are purely context-based. There's no account to which my search data is tied to. My device makes no third-party connections when opening the results page. That's better than 95% of the web. Perfect is the enemy of good.

rvnx 7y ago

"privacy" Recommending DuckDuckGo is like recommending Ghostery for privacy. For now the chain looks like this: Amazon Web Services -> DuckDuckGo -> Yahoo -> Microsoft Privacy is not the more intermediaries you add, the more private you become. Same as adding a VPN or a proxy, you just become vulnerable to the proxy operator and all their intermediates and dependencies. And yes DuckDuckGo is tracking, for example, everything you buy on Amazon. They are Amazon Affiliates, and as part of how Amazon Affiliates work DuckDuckGo has access to the precise list of items that users bought. Yes, Cloudflare, NordVPN and DuckDuckGo and Brave and you have the perfect "privacy" setup. If you want to believe, then go ahead.

robjan 7y ago
As an Amazon Associate you have access to what items were bought in a transaction but not who bought them.