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We have a page specifically about helping people switch: https://duckduckgo.com/spread https://duckduckgo.com/spread To answer your question though, comprehens

by yegg 4y ago

We have a page specifically about helping people switch: https://duckduckgo.com/spread https://duckduckgo.com/spread To answer your question though, comprehensive privacy protection prevents data profiles from getting created about you, which in turn prevents ad and other content targeting. This targeting, regardless of how it's done, enables general manipulation (e.g., exploiting personal characteristics for commercial or political gain), filter bubbles (e.g., creating echo chambers that can divide people), and discrimination (e.g., people not seeing job opportunities based on personal profiles). More generally though, I view privacy as protecting you from coercion. Yes, it protects personal information, but that's not the real point. The real point is autonomy -- the freedom to make decisions without coercion. From this perspective in addition to helping reduce identity theft, commercial exploitation, ideological manipulation, discrimination, polarization, etc., it also helps reduce self-surveillance (i.e., chilling effects), and just general loss of freedom (e.g., mass surveillance).

jeffbee 4y ago
> prevents ad and other content targeting You want me to pitch my mom on un-targeted advertising? How do you phrase it in practice? "On Google, you get evil ads relevant to you, such as restaurants near you. On Duck Duck Go your privacy is protected, so you get ads for restaurants in Omaha, Nebraska. Therefore you should switch to Duck Duck Go". Something like that? This comment is based on the actual results I was served by DDG for "best burger".
- guelo 4y ago
  Your mom will have a better experience and more control if she learns to search for "best burger in <city name>" instead of trying to give the wheel to Google's mind reading AIs.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    My mom is completely satisfied with Google, so we're discussing some theoretical mom. I honestly do not understand the pitch, that's why I want to hear it from the horse's mouth. Scare words like "tracking" and "profile" and "targeting" are used by the privacy fear industry to disparage the practice of having implicit terms in your search query. These implicit terms greatly improve search quality, which is why the results on Google are so much better. Advertisements are their own separate search corpus where good ranking is desired and the implicit elements of the search vector are also helpful there. To me there can be no rational case made that omitting the implicit terms improves the quality of the result.
    - oefrha 4y ago
      Same. Tried to sell my mom on some privacy stuff, zero care. Tried to sell her on unique passwords and a password manager, zero care. And so on. Lots of people (most people?) want to do the bare minimum with computers. Sacrificing convenience for privacy or whatnot isn’t something they would accept.
    - guelo 4y ago
      Google's search engine is awful. In case you hadn't noticed rants about it are increasingly popular. Part of the reason is that Google keeps taking away user's control of the tool, partly in the name of convenience but also to manipulate you, get you to click on favored links, show you ads or extend their search monopoly to other products. I'm not arguing that duckduckgo/bing are any better, just that these tracking convenience features have a dark side and many times work against your best interest.
      - oefrha 4y ago
        > rants about it are increasingly popular. 1. Never heard any rant about it outside tech circles. 2. I've given DDG many chances when Google failed to return satisfactory results. In those many cases DDG results were just about the same or even less relevant. Google changing the query? Well DDG either also changes it or returns irrelevant results not containing the query anyway. The single advantage of DDG I've noticed is that it doesn't CAPTCHA me on a VPN connection.
  - Invictus0 4y ago
    That doesn't sound like a better experience to me.
- yellowapple 4y ago
  The normal results are going to be global (though I do sometimes see local results), but the map view and list of places are both geolocated by default. In any case, searching instead for "best burger near $CITY" doesn't seem terribly difficult (and that's in fact how I generally write my queries).
digisign 4y ago
It's a shame that page doesn't address the benefits you mention here eloquently. It basically just says we don't track you, and implies that is good. I do think it is good but it's losing the value prop for most people. Please put your second paragraph up at the top of that page, maybe with some bullet points and icons and I'll send out the URL.

by yegg 4y ago

jeffbee 4y ago

> prevents ad and other content targeting You want me to pitch my mom on un-targeted advertising? How do you phrase it in practice? "On Google, you get evil ads relevant to you, such as restaurants near you. On Duck Duck Go your privacy is protected, so you get ads for restaurants in Omaha, Nebraska. Therefore you should switch to Duck Duck Go". Something like that? This comment is based on the actual results I was served by DDG for "best burger".

guelo 4y ago
Your mom will have a better experience and more control if she learns to search for "best burger in <city name>" instead of trying to give the wheel to Google's mind reading AIs.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  My mom is completely satisfied with Google, so we're discussing some theoretical mom. I honestly do not understand the pitch, that's why I want to hear it from the horse's mouth. Scare words like "tracking" and "profile" and "targeting" are used by the privacy fear industry to disparage the practice of having implicit terms in your search query. These implicit terms greatly improve search quality, which is why the results on Google are so much better. Advertisements are their own separate search corpus where good ranking is desired and the implicit elements of the search vector are also helpful there. To me there can be no rational case made that omitting the implicit terms improves the quality of the result.
  - oefrha 4y ago
    Same. Tried to sell my mom on some privacy stuff, zero care. Tried to sell her on unique passwords and a password manager, zero care. And so on. Lots of people (most people?) want to do the bare minimum with computers. Sacrificing convenience for privacy or whatnot isn’t something they would accept.
  - guelo 4y ago
    Google's search engine is awful. In case you hadn't noticed rants about it are increasingly popular. Part of the reason is that Google keeps taking away user's control of the tool, partly in the name of convenience but also to manipulate you, get you to click on favored links, show you ads or extend their search monopoly to other products. I'm not arguing that duckduckgo/bing are any better, just that these tracking convenience features have a dark side and many times work against your best interest.
    - oefrha 4y ago
      > rants about it are increasingly popular. 1. Never heard any rant about it outside tech circles. 2. I've given DDG many chances when Google failed to return satisfactory results. In those many cases DDG results were just about the same or even less relevant. Google changing the query? Well DDG either also changes it or returns irrelevant results not containing the query anyway. The single advantage of DDG I've noticed is that it doesn't CAPTCHA me on a VPN connection.
- Invictus0 4y ago
  That doesn't sound like a better experience to me.
yellowapple 4y ago
The normal results are going to be global (though I do sometimes see local results), but the map view and list of places are both geolocated by default. In any case, searching instead for "best burger near $CITY" doesn't seem terribly difficult (and that's in fact how I generally write my queries).

digisign 4y ago

It's a shame that page doesn't address the benefits you mention here eloquently. It basically just says we don't track you, and implies that is good. I do think it is good but it's losing the value prop for most people. Please put your second paragraph up at the top of that page, maybe with some bullet points and icons and I'll send out the URL.