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DuckDuckGo Isn’t as Private as You Thought
- mikece 4y agoIf you are doing ANYTHING on the internet you do not have privacy. If this is news to you then the internet isn't as private as you thought.
- amelius 4y agoTrue, but DDG using trackers is a problem of a different order.
- cassianoleal 4y agoPrivacy is not binary. There are degrees of it and it's dependent on context. The problem here is that DDG promotes itself as a highly private service and at the same time makes a deal to share tracking data with (arguably) one of the worst privacy offenders. This makes them substantially less privacy-friendly than they make it seem.
- 0des 4y agoEither something is private or it is not. What you suggest is that most situations favor the latter.
- cassianoleal 4y agoThe only thing that's 100% private are your own thoughts, as long as you don't share them. Everything else fits in a gradient.
- env123 4y agoWith respect to Microsoft being one of the worst privacy offenders, can you please expand on this? Why can't you just unlink your Microsoft login and use offline account if you're using Windows, or use ad blockers? Even if you somehow see an ad aimed at you, why can't it be in your power to just ignore them? Think in the terms of "I'll only look up a product/services if I have a functional need for it" rather than fall to the trap of "just because I have lots of money doesn't mean I have to spend it today"? A lot of times by the way if I see something I fancy, I'd end up looking at Amazon and find the best product at affordable cost, so I don't really click on any ads. If I recall even, I NEVER click on an ad, I'd go as far that I ignored sponsored ads in Amazon, so what's the problem with ads?
- cassianoleal 4y agoI was talking about Microsoft being an offender in general, not necessarily anything specific to this deal. That said, each new datapoint a large data broker like Microsoft gets adds that much more to their ability to deanonymise you, regardless of whether you're logged in to any of their services or not. This can happen more directly (e.g. shared, long-lived cookies), or indirectly via techniques like fingerprinting.
- theshrike79 4y agoAlready discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31490515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31490515 395 points, 240 comments
- endre 4y agoDDG is just another company that converts (y)our data to money.
- FabHK 4y agoMy understanding is that they make money by providing ads based on your current search, a bit like a good old gardening magazine would make money by printing ads related to gardening. That is very unlike Google and Facebook etc.
- endre 4y agoI did not compare it to other companies and my statement is still true. Prove me wrong you all down-voters.
- michaelcampbell 4y ago> just another company By using "another" vs "a" you are implicitly drawing a comparison. And, I think we all, and you, are very aware of that.
- _1 4y agoSecond hit piece in DDG in as many days.
- AlexandrB 4y agoSeems like media coverage of the same Microsoft issue that was posted on HN yesterday. Hardly a "hit piece".
- Agamus 4y agoTo me, this is clearly a hit piece. The headlines insinuate that this applies to all of DDG. This only affects the DDG mobile app. Just for starters, and not to be snarky, but doesn't the very use of a mobile telephone contradict concerns about privacy? The whole thing has a slashdotty kind of odor to it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- peppermint_tea 4y ago"doesn't the very use of a mobile telephone contradict concerns about privacy" yes. bought the Librem5... still waiting though...
- utucuro 4y agoSensational stuff sells... Better to focus on the twitter conversation linked from the article instead.
- jamesredd 4y agoI switched over to Brave Browser and Brave Search, both more than sufficient to meet my needs.
- my69thaccount 4y agoBrave is 100x worse than DDG, they're just cryptocurrency grifters. Their search service isn't OSS either.
- FargaColora 4y agoI think Brave has builtin crypto nonsense though? Which is worse than any trackers.
- basch 4y agoHow? You have the option to see ads and get paid. Don't opt in if it doesnt interest you. It shouldnt even be in the same conversation as trackers tracking you across the internet. It's also such a small part of their product. Without it on, you wouldnt notice it exists.
- FargaColora 4y agoIt's a curate's egg situation. "Only a little bit of our product contains the largest tech scam of the 21st century". Once a small part of your product is infected, the entire product is corrupted.
- micromacrofoot 4y agoDuckDuckGo's browser isn't as private as you thought; this doesn't seem relevant to their search engine, which AFAIK is what most people think of when they see "DuckDuckGo"
- bil7 4y agoYup. You would have thought HN would care about the truth rather than just reading headlines and assuming the worst. I imagine very few people here are even using the DDG browser.
- 300bps 4y agoI was not even aware that DDG has a browser.
- SahAssar 4y agoIt's a rebranded webview/chromium like basically all alternative browsers.
- utucuro 4y agoI think I have it, though I never really found a need for it since I have DDG set up as search engine on mobile firefox anyway. There is no point to that app...
- FabHK 4y agoYes, and insofar as other browsers don't block any scripts, it seems safe to say that the DDG browser is still strictly better than those other browsers, isn't it?
- michaelcampbell 4y agoThanks for pointing this out. It is certainly what /I/ thought of.
- baisq 4y agoAs much as I enjoy hating DDG, this is about their browser, not their search engine. I doubt many people use their browser at all, so this doesn't impact as many people as the title implies.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- marban 4y agoDDG has received too much unconditional, cryptomaniac-like praise (from HN), so it's good to give them some doubt every now and then.
- jbirer 4y agoHN is very susceptible to pseudo-nerd hype (Encrypted apps that are actually honeypots, decentralized networks that really are not etc), since a lot of people are not very deeply technical (but consider themselves geeks) they fall for this type of marketing.
- nightski 4y agoDoubt is fine, but there aren't many alternatives in this space. Relative to the competition I feel it deserves this praise.
- my69thaccount 4y agoDDG is more private than Google or Bing, which is what really matters for most people. But since it's closed source, there is a degree of risk that it tracks more than it says. It might eventually get purchased or coerced somehow (like their recent contract issues with MS.) Searx is the best search engine I'm aware of right now provided you can find an instance that works (searx.be is good for me.)
- AshamedCaptain 4y agoIs it really more private? I don't think we can ever know. The fact that DDG is neither of Google or Bing should probably be what really matters.
- twirlock 4y ago
- QuadrupleA 4y agoCould we change the title to say "DuckDuckGo Browser Isn't..."? This has nothing to do with their search.
- Mordisquitos 4y agoPlus, this might be a bit nitpicky on my part, but “X isn't as Y as you thought” headlines are almost always uninformative clickbait. I mean, how private did I think DuckDuckGo [browser] was before? Did you think it was more private than I did? Or less? How private did the author believe it to be? I would much prefer informative headlines which make no assumption of prior beliefs, for example: “X sells itself as Y, but it does Z” “X not as Y as alternative option A is” ...or even a headline where the author's subjective belief is invoked, if that is the style of the article: “X isn't as Y as I thought”