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Can someone please explain why we are supposed to trust DDG? Isnt it just a random website that popped up out of nowhere claiming to be private yet no audit has

Can someone please explain why we are supposed to trust DDG? Isnt it just a random website that popped up out of nowhere claiming to be private yet no audit has ever been conducted which substantiated those claims?

no_time 4y ago
You aren't supposed to. Even if you assume they lie in every sentence about their data collection, with their current setup it would be much harder for them to build a valuable shadow profile about you. They haven't been caught running fingerprinting scripts yet and they dont have an account system to tie to your searches. At best they could use your ip to build a shadow profile and thats wildly inaccurate in our mostly ipv4 world.
- unknownaccount 4y ago
  How do you know what server-side profiling occurs or does not occur? There is no way to know that. DDG gives people a completely misplaced and false sense of security, when they are just as easily comprimisable/corruptable/subpoenable/susceptible to NSLs, EDRs and secret court orders as any other company. And I disagree with your premise that it's particularly difficult to link a persons IP to their real world identity. There are organized fraud gangs who have it down to a science. know exactly what dept. of the ISP to call, what to say, etc. Basically if someone knows your IP and your ISP account is registered in your name it's game over.
  - no_time 4y ago
    I am aware that they are susepctible to nation state level data collection, just like every site on the internet. I conduct all my non e2e encrypted communications/interactions with this in mind. I just want to avoid my data being monetized.
    - unknownaccount 4y ago
      I'm more worried about teenage crooks equipped with Emergency Data Request PDF templates than any nation state. We know Google, Facebook, Snapchat etc were all giving up information on users without a court order to these crooks. All it took(probably still) was a EDR notice alleging an imminent threat to human life is about to occur -sent from a real or fake police dept email- and companies will hand over your data without second thought.
  - tremon 4y ago
    Even if they do server-side profiling, they can only track you on duckduckgo.com. Last I checked, DDG did not also own an analytics service that has infested half the world's websites.
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      > Last I checked, DDG did not also own an analytics service that has infested half the world's websites. uMatrix shows a 3rd party request to improving.duckduckgo.com every time I visit a page from DDG search results, ostensibly to measure click-through rate. This is claimed to be anonymous, but in principle it gives DDG the opportunity to log much about their users' browsing habits.
      - danShumway 4y ago
        Even in the worst case scenario you propose, where DuckDuckGo is deliberately lying and collecting more information than they claim and where those clickthrough requests are sending as much information as is possible for them to send, this is still exposing you to way less risk than Google Analytics. It is still, I would claim, objectively more private to use DuckDuckGo than Google even in a world where they are lying about their privacy policies, purely because DuckDuckGo does not have the same surveillance scope and level of infrastructure as Google. And that's really what we're arguing about here, unless you have a more private alternative to DuckDuckGo that has been subject to more rigorous audits and can scale to support being the default search engine for a bunch of nontechnical users?
        richardsocher 4y ago
        I'm gonna throw you.com (i'm a co-founder) into that mix. We've been growing a lot and have a private mode that stores nothing at all. What audit would you suggest for us to prove that statement? It would be great to have a some independent party verify this.
        danShumway 4y ago
  - 7v3x3n3sem9vv 4y ago
    DDG offers a JavaScript-less page. don't trust them use that. don't trust them at all? don't use them?
    - lcampbell 4y ago
      As a regular user of the Javascript-less page, several months ago it started returning wildly different results than the “fully featured” version for the same queries. My uneducated guess is that it’s using a different index. There also appears to be some sort of rate-limiting wherein the results will frequently just be empty (using the JS version and same query resolves the issue). I’m guessing they’re intentionally degrading the non-Javascript page as an anti-bot measure, but it’s so bad that I find it disingenuous to suggest that the non-Javascript page even a valid alternative at this point.
dec0dedab0de 4y ago
It is a legit company based in Pennsylvania, not some random website. Their privacy policy explicitly states they do not collect user info. If they are caught doing it anyway they could be open to legal action. While they may be lying, at least it's better than other search engines where collecting data is explicit and built into their business model. edit: I should have just down-voted and moved on.
- unknownaccount 4y ago
  That doesnt mean anything. I can go ahead and register an LLC in Pennsylvania too for a few hundred bucks and then put up a website with a completely fictional privacy policy. I could collect everyones IPs depite claims that we do not, and no one would be able to prove it.
  - troad 4y ago
    I don’t understand why folk seem to think that admitting they are capable of fraud is some kind of dunk. I mean - yea. Maybe your dentist never actually graduated dental school. Did you call the dental association to check he’s a member? Anyone can just print out a certificate on their home printer and put it on their wall, y’know. And even if he is, do you think the dental association actually called his college to verify the transcript he gave them when he joined in 1988 or whatever? You really should do an independent audit of your dentist’s dentistry skills. Perhaps you should demand he does some kind of standardised test. But he can’t just go to a testing centre, you have no way of verifying that. He must do the test in front of you. And how do you know the answers to the standardised test are correct, anyway? You will need to do a dentistry degree yourself first. TLDR: A trustless society doesn’t work, and most people aren’t out to pull one over you.
- jader201 4y ago
  > While they may be lying, at least it's better than other search engines where collecting data is explicit and built into their business model. Just to be clear, are you saying that given the choice between collecting data and lying about it vs. collecting data and being explicit about it, you’d choose the first option?
yegg 4y ago
Recently the National Advertising Division looked into our privacy claims and found them supported, see https://bbbprograms.org/media-center/newsroom/duckduckgo-privacy-claims https://bbbprograms.org/media-center/newsroom/duckduckgo-pri... & https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/privacy-protection/1210654/nad-issues-decisions-regarding-privacy-claims-by-browsers https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/privacy-protection/12106... Also a lot of what we do is open source on GitHub. We recently put out a help page detailing or web tracking protections that link to a lot of the relevant repositories: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/web-tracking-protections/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/we... And finally, I’m not sure that random or just popped up is an accurate characterization for us. We’re pretty well established at this point, having been around for nearly 15 years! I was an early user of this site and a frequent contributor during the early days of DuckDuckGo.
- unknownaccount 4y ago
  Those aren't proper audits. And again, bringing up the fact that it's open source is a meaningless piece of information since there is no way to verify it's the same software code on production. It only serves to trick the average user who doesn't understand how web servers work into trusting your service more. The best thing you could do, if you actually care about privacy and not just $$$, is to open-source the entire search index db and accompanying webserver software, making it easy for users to setup their own local instance of DDG which is actually auditable. Additionally, posting a notice on-site which notifies your users that their searches may be recorded and tracked in spite of what the privacy policy says(due to the USA jurisdiction of the company making it susceptible to National Security Letters and secret gag orders) would be the right thing to do.
  - 7v3x3n3sem9vv 4y ago
    > Those aren't proper audits. And again, bringing up the face that it's open source is a meaningless piece of information since there is no way to verify it's the same software code on production. > The best thing you could do, if you actually care about privacy and not just $$$, is to open-source the entire search index db and accompanying webserver software, making it easy for users to setup their own local instance of DDG which is truly auditable. self hosting isn't feasible for 99% of the population. DDG is aiming to be the mainstream privacy protecting search engine, I used them for a while and can appreciate their efforts. if you want something nerdy and and self hosted use a searX instance or host it yourself.
danShumway 4y ago
You're not supposed to totally trust DDG, but they are a better default search engine than Google if you care about privacy. - they are less likely to throw a captcha in your face if you connect over VPN - they have less surveillance infrastructure and run less code clientside than Google does - they are at least not explicitly tracking you - they have a lower number of secondary data-points from other services that can be connected to your searches the list kind of goes on. I don't assume that DuckDuckGo is perfectly trustworthy just because they say so, but Debian has a choice of a couple of different default search engines that are mature enough and give good enough results to use as a default search tool: Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc... Of those choices, DuckDuckGo seems to be a pretty reasonable decision. At the very least, DuckDuckGo lets me search when I'm behind a VPN and have anti-fingerprinting tools turned on, Google very often doesn't. It's not a super-hard decision for me which one is more private.
- fomine3 4y ago
  Maybe DDG is good replacement for English users, but I wonder does debian developers considered is it fine for global users.
  - danShumway 4y ago
    Of course they do, when the alternative is Google. Do you want to try and argue that Google is a more private search engine than DDG outside of the US?
    - fomine3 4y ago
      privacy isn't the only one criterion to choose search engine. If search quality is very poor for a language, it's not suitable even if it's privacy oriented.
      - danShumway 4y ago
        Sure, but that's really a separate conversation than what this thread has been talking about so far -- which is whether or not we can trust that DDG is more private than Google.
slongfield 4y ago
If you're worried about it, you can buy searches directly from Bing ( https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/pricing https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/pricing ). DDG makes no secret that the Bing search API is where they get their link and image results -- https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/ .
- loudmax 4y ago
  Actually that's the only problem I have with DuckDuckGo. I don't have much trust in Google, but I have less trust in Microsoft.
notriddle 4y ago
If you don't trust them, use https://duckduckgogg42xjoc72x3sjasowoarfbgcmvfimaftt6twagswzczad.onion/ https://duckduckgogg42xjoc72x3sjasowoarfbgcmvfimaftt6twagswz...
chlorion 4y ago
Thanks for bringing this up. I don't understand why people seem to automatically trust things just because they advertise as being more "private" than the alternatives. I guess none of us are immune to advertising tactics, but it's so important to remember that they have no obligation to be truthful and will lie every chance they get. I am not claiming that DDG is bad or anything, I just don't like putting trust into something just because it says "you can totally trust me!".

no_time 4y ago

You aren't supposed to. Even if you assume they lie in every sentence about their data collection, with their current setup it would be much harder for them to build a valuable shadow profile about you. They haven't been caught running fingerprinting scripts yet and they dont have an account system to tie to your searches. At best they could use your ip to build a shadow profile and thats wildly inaccurate in our mostly ipv4 world.

unknownaccount 4y ago
How do you know what server-side profiling occurs or does not occur? There is no way to know that. DDG gives people a completely misplaced and false sense of security, when they are just as easily comprimisable/corruptable/subpoenable/susceptible to NSLs, EDRs and secret court orders as any other company. And I disagree with your premise that it's particularly difficult to link a persons IP to their real world identity. There are organized fraud gangs who have it down to a science. know exactly what dept. of the ISP to call, what to say, etc. Basically if someone knows your IP and your ISP account is registered in your name it's game over.
- no_time 4y ago
  I am aware that they are susepctible to nation state level data collection, just like every site on the internet. I conduct all my non e2e encrypted communications/interactions with this in mind. I just want to avoid my data being monetized.
  - unknownaccount 4y ago
    I'm more worried about teenage crooks equipped with Emergency Data Request PDF templates than any nation state. We know Google, Facebook, Snapchat etc were all giving up information on users without a court order to these crooks. All it took(probably still) was a EDR notice alleging an imminent threat to human life is about to occur -sent from a real or fake police dept email- and companies will hand over your data without second thought.
- tremon 4y ago
  Even if they do server-side profiling, they can only track you on duckduckgo.com. Last I checked, DDG did not also own an analytics service that has infested half the world's websites.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    > Last I checked, DDG did not also own an analytics service that has infested half the world's websites. uMatrix shows a 3rd party request to improving.duckduckgo.com every time I visit a page from DDG search results, ostensibly to measure click-through rate. This is claimed to be anonymous, but in principle it gives DDG the opportunity to log much about their users' browsing habits.
    - danShumway 4y ago
      Even in the worst case scenario you propose, where DuckDuckGo is deliberately lying and collecting more information than they claim and where those clickthrough requests are sending as much information as is possible for them to send, this is still exposing you to way less risk than Google Analytics. It is still, I would claim, objectively more private to use DuckDuckGo than Google even in a world where they are lying about their privacy policies, purely because DuckDuckGo does not have the same surveillance scope and level of infrastructure as Google. And that's really what we're arguing about here, unless you have a more private alternative to DuckDuckGo that has been subject to more rigorous audits and can scale to support being the default search engine for a bunch of nontechnical users?
      - richardsocher 4y ago
        I'm gonna throw you.com (i'm a co-founder) into that mix. We've been growing a lot and have a private mode that stores nothing at all. What audit would you suggest for us to prove that statement? It would be great to have a some independent party verify this.
        danShumway 4y ago
- 7v3x3n3sem9vv 4y ago
  DDG offers a JavaScript-less page. don't trust them use that. don't trust them at all? don't use them?
  - lcampbell 4y ago
    As a regular user of the Javascript-less page, several months ago it started returning wildly different results than the “fully featured” version for the same queries. My uneducated guess is that it’s using a different index. There also appears to be some sort of rate-limiting wherein the results will frequently just be empty (using the JS version and same query resolves the issue). I’m guessing they’re intentionally degrading the non-Javascript page as an anti-bot measure, but it’s so bad that I find it disingenuous to suggest that the non-Javascript page even a valid alternative at this point.

dec0dedab0de 4y ago

It is a legit company based in Pennsylvania, not some random website. Their privacy policy explicitly states they do not collect user info. If they are caught doing it anyway they could be open to legal action. While they may be lying, at least it's better than other search engines where collecting data is explicit and built into their business model. edit: I should have just down-voted and moved on.

unknownaccount 4y ago
That doesnt mean anything. I can go ahead and register an LLC in Pennsylvania too for a few hundred bucks and then put up a website with a completely fictional privacy policy. I could collect everyones IPs depite claims that we do not, and no one would be able to prove it.
- troad 4y ago
  I don’t understand why folk seem to think that admitting they are capable of fraud is some kind of dunk. I mean - yea. Maybe your dentist never actually graduated dental school. Did you call the dental association to check he’s a member? Anyone can just print out a certificate on their home printer and put it on their wall, y’know. And even if he is, do you think the dental association actually called his college to verify the transcript he gave them when he joined in 1988 or whatever? You really should do an independent audit of your dentist’s dentistry skills. Perhaps you should demand he does some kind of standardised test. But he can’t just go to a testing centre, you have no way of verifying that. He must do the test in front of you. And how do you know the answers to the standardised test are correct, anyway? You will need to do a dentistry degree yourself first. TLDR: A trustless society doesn’t work, and most people aren’t out to pull one over you.
jader201 4y ago
> While they may be lying, at least it's better than other search engines where collecting data is explicit and built into their business model. Just to be clear, are you saying that given the choice between collecting data and lying about it vs. collecting data and being explicit about it, you’d choose the first option?

yegg 4y ago

Recently the National Advertising Division looked into our privacy claims and found them supported, see https://bbbprograms.org/media-center/newsroom/duckduckgo-privacy-claims https://bbbprograms.org/media-center/newsroom/duckduckgo-pri... & https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/privacy-protection/1210654/nad-issues-decisions-regarding-privacy-claims-by-browsers https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/privacy-protection/12106... Also a lot of what we do is open source on GitHub. We recently put out a help page detailing or web tracking protections that link to a lot of the relevant repositories: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/web-tracking-protections/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/we... And finally, I’m not sure that random or just popped up is an accurate characterization for us. We’re pretty well established at this point, having been around for nearly 15 years! I was an early user of this site and a frequent contributor during the early days of DuckDuckGo.

unknownaccount 4y ago
Those aren't proper audits. And again, bringing up the fact that it's open source is a meaningless piece of information since there is no way to verify it's the same software code on production. It only serves to trick the average user who doesn't understand how web servers work into trusting your service more. The best thing you could do, if you actually care about privacy and not just $$$, is to open-source the entire search index db and accompanying webserver software, making it easy for users to setup their own local instance of DDG which is actually auditable. Additionally, posting a notice on-site which notifies your users that their searches may be recorded and tracked in spite of what the privacy policy says(due to the USA jurisdiction of the company making it susceptible to National Security Letters and secret gag orders) would be the right thing to do.
- 7v3x3n3sem9vv 4y ago
  > Those aren't proper audits. And again, bringing up the face that it's open source is a meaningless piece of information since there is no way to verify it's the same software code on production. > The best thing you could do, if you actually care about privacy and not just $$$, is to open-source the entire search index db and accompanying webserver software, making it easy for users to setup their own local instance of DDG which is truly auditable. self hosting isn't feasible for 99% of the population. DDG is aiming to be the mainstream privacy protecting search engine, I used them for a while and can appreciate their efforts. if you want something nerdy and and self hosted use a searX instance or host it yourself.

danShumway 4y ago

You're not supposed to totally trust DDG, but they are a better default search engine than Google if you care about privacy. - they are less likely to throw a captcha in your face if you connect over VPN - they have less surveillance infrastructure and run less code clientside than Google does - they are at least not explicitly tracking you - they have a lower number of secondary data-points from other services that can be connected to your searches the list kind of goes on. I don't assume that DuckDuckGo is perfectly trustworthy just because they say so, but Debian has a choice of a couple of different default search engines that are mature enough and give good enough results to use as a default search tool: Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc... Of those choices, DuckDuckGo seems to be a pretty reasonable decision. At the very least, DuckDuckGo lets me search when I'm behind a VPN and have anti-fingerprinting tools turned on, Google very often doesn't. It's not a super-hard decision for me which one is more private.

fomine3 4y ago
Maybe DDG is good replacement for English users, but I wonder does debian developers considered is it fine for global users.
- danShumway 4y ago
  Of course they do, when the alternative is Google. Do you want to try and argue that Google is a more private search engine than DDG outside of the US?
  - fomine3 4y ago
    privacy isn't the only one criterion to choose search engine. If search quality is very poor for a language, it's not suitable even if it's privacy oriented.
    - danShumway 4y ago
      Sure, but that's really a separate conversation than what this thread has been talking about so far -- which is whether or not we can trust that DDG is more private than Google.

slongfield 4y ago

If you're worried about it, you can buy searches directly from Bing ( https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/pricing https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/pricing ). DDG makes no secret that the Bing search API is where they get their link and image results -- https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/ .

loudmax 4y ago
Actually that's the only problem I have with DuckDuckGo. I don't have much trust in Google, but I have less trust in Microsoft.

notriddle 4y ago

If you don't trust them, use https://duckduckgogg42xjoc72x3sjasowoarfbgcmvfimaftt6twagswzczad.onion/ https://duckduckgogg42xjoc72x3sjasowoarfbgcmvfimaftt6twagswz...

chlorion 4y ago

Thanks for bringing this up. I don't understand why people seem to automatically trust things just because they advertise as being more "private" than the alternatives. I guess none of us are immune to advertising tactics, but it's so important to remember that they have no obligation to be truthful and will lie every chance they get. I am not claiming that DDG is bad or anything, I just don't like putting trust into something just because it says "you can totally trust me!".