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I'm using DuckDuckGo almost exclusively[1] for years now and I'm pretty happy with it. I don't see much benefit in their browser though. I think their "Privacy

I'm using DuckDuckGo almost exclusively[1] for years now and I'm pretty happy with it. I don't see much benefit in their browser though. I think their "Privacy Grade", which is shown very prominently in the browser UI, is more harm than help. It is much too strict and rating everything down is counter to their intention. Is a B site still OK? What about a C, or. B+? If nothing is A, this is just confusing to the user. Is there any website, except duckduckgo.com itself, that has an A rating? Why has a perfectly legit site like Wikipedia only a B rating? Ironically even the service they use to rate terms of service (https://tosdr.org/ https://tosdr.org/) only has a rating of B+, because of "Unknown Privacy Practices" in their very own terms of service. [1] The only exception being local searches.

iruoy 5y ago
> Why has a perfectly legit site like Wikipedia only a B rating? https://tosdr.org/en/service/265 https://tosdr.org/en/service/265
yegg 5y ago
DuckDuckGo for Mac (the subject of this post) does not use privacy grades of any kind. We will be moving away for them on all platforms soon, and they were never used for search rankings, just for transparency. On using our app more generally, please see my comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31002089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31002089 As to what is going on with privacy grades more generally, we never felt comfortable rating a site an A if we couldn't assess their privacy policy, since they could be doing very nefarious things (e.g., selling your data). We tried to work with groups to get more assessments on more sites, but never found a scalable way to do this. We even licensed various ML analysis algorithms for privacy policies, but always found significant issues with them. In the end, I think this stems from the fact that privacy policies themselves are too vague.
- u2077 5y ago
  I agree that privacy grades are misleading, they could be replaced by the number of trackers blocked.
ARandomerDude 5y ago
Exactly. I run a static site over SSL with zero trackers, analytics, etc. but I get a B+ from DDG for "unknown privacy practices."
- dylan604 5y ago
  Well just make your privacy practices known then! /s Seems simple!

iruoy 5y ago

> Why has a perfectly legit site like Wikipedia only a B rating? https://tosdr.org/en/service/265 https://tosdr.org/en/service/265

yegg 5y ago

DuckDuckGo for Mac (the subject of this post) does not use privacy grades of any kind. We will be moving away for them on all platforms soon, and they were never used for search rankings, just for transparency. On using our app more generally, please see my comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31002089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31002089 As to what is going on with privacy grades more generally, we never felt comfortable rating a site an A if we couldn't assess their privacy policy, since they could be doing very nefarious things (e.g., selling your data). We tried to work with groups to get more assessments on more sites, but never found a scalable way to do this. We even licensed various ML analysis algorithms for privacy policies, but always found significant issues with them. In the end, I think this stems from the fact that privacy policies themselves are too vague.

u2077 5y ago
I agree that privacy grades are misleading, they could be replaced by the number of trackers blocked.

ARandomerDude 5y ago

Exactly. I run a static site over SSL with zero trackers, analytics, etc. but I get a B+ from DDG for "unknown privacy practices."

dylan604 5y ago
Well just make your privacy practices known then! /s Seems simple!