4 ms·

The auto-suggest feature feels like a step backwards in terms of privacy: - it indicates that there's a fairly thorough recording of searches going on, and ack

by ronaldx 12y ago

The auto-suggest feature feels like a step backwards in terms of privacy: - it indicates that there's a fairly thorough recording of searches going on, and acknowledges a reasonable possibility of keypress-by-keypress recording, and - it doesn't work as well as google's version which accounts for local variation, and which formed part of my decision to reject google in favour of ddg. Overall this feature creeps me out, in an "uncanny valley" kind of way. It makes me uncomfortable.

yegg 12y ago
To be clear, we still don't collect or share personal information and auto-suggest does not impact that at all. I appreciate it may make you and others uncomfortable and we're sensitive to that, but it is not a change in terms of privacy. We simply do not associate queries with personal information (e.g. IP addresses) and in fact don't store any of it at all.
- ronaldx 12y ago
  Understood. Can you clarify how you have the data to provide an auto-suggest?
  - andrewguenther 12y ago
    It looks like it is based on sets of bigrams and trigrams pulled from pages which they have indexed.
    - ronaldx 12y ago
      Quick example: "Is my password... cats6plus" does not appear to be pulled from any page(?)
  - pnathan 12y ago
    Not yegg, but if you store a database of queries, along with frequencies, you can do a prefix match on what's already in the search box and return that. I'm speculating that DDG does something that. It doesn't take any PII to do that unless the query itself includes PII. E.g., "websites operated by paul nathan" is pretty PII. :)
    - ronaldx 12y ago
      Saving - and now seemingly publishing - search queries is saving and publishing PII. http://donttrack.us http://donttrack.us directly acknowledges that search queries can be used to personally identify individuals. I therefore understood from the later statement on that site, "[ddg doesn't] store any personal information at all", that this would include search queries: ddg almost literally advertises itself on the fact that it doesn't save search queries. (According to the small print, I understood this wrong.) It would be a shame if your explanation was the correct one.
      - dekz 12y ago
        But that is in conjunction with a browser fingerprint right? I don't follow that DDG not being able to save anonymous queries disregards their stance on privacy? Surely for the best experience you'd want DDG to do this anonymously.
      - germano 12y ago
        By the grandparent's description, the difference would be that DDG is not saving the ip address and browser information associated with the search query. If they're only saving the frequency of each search query and nothing else, then there would be no way to see for a particular user/browser/ip address what search queries have been performed because that dimension to the data simply doesn't exist.
      - crazypyro 12y ago
        I think the difference here is that there is no association of the search term with a specific search. If they see a term, they simply add 1 to the counter. Of course, that is probably vastly simplifying it. Basically, your search is thrown into a pool with all of the other searches. It possibly never even has an id associated with it. Just a frequency number. For example, say I start to type "movie t", it'll see that often times after the word "movie", "times" appears at a high frequency so that could be one of the suggestions. I don't see how this introduces a privacy issue unless they are saving the searches by some personal identification number (whether thats an ip, user id, computer, etc), which they specifically deny. Without the specific identifier, there is no way to say it was user A who searched for "movie times" 300 times in a row and not 300 different users searching for "movie times"
- Pacabel 12y ago
  Could this be a feature that is disabled by default, but that can be easily enabled if a user does wish to use it? I don't know the best way to do this, but I'm thinking a checkbox somewhere near the search bar, or perhaps a prefix similar to "g!" that'll enable it for any further text that's entered, or something along those lines.
andrey-p 12y ago
Fully agree, these were the same things that popped in my head when I saw it. Though I have to say autocomplete for !commands is an excellent addition.

by ronaldx 12y ago

yegg 12y ago

To be clear, we still don't collect or share personal information and auto-suggest does not impact that at all. I appreciate it may make you and others uncomfortable and we're sensitive to that, but it is not a change in terms of privacy. We simply do not associate queries with personal information (e.g. IP addresses) and in fact don't store any of it at all.

ronaldx 12y ago
Understood. Can you clarify how you have the data to provide an auto-suggest?
- andrewguenther 12y ago
  It looks like it is based on sets of bigrams and trigrams pulled from pages which they have indexed.
  - ronaldx 12y ago
    Quick example: "Is my password... cats6plus" does not appear to be pulled from any page(?)
- pnathan 12y ago
  Not yegg, but if you store a database of queries, along with frequencies, you can do a prefix match on what's already in the search box and return that. I'm speculating that DDG does something that. It doesn't take any PII to do that unless the query itself includes PII. E.g., "websites operated by paul nathan" is pretty PII. :)
  - ronaldx 12y ago
    Saving - and now seemingly publishing - search queries is saving and publishing PII. http://donttrack.us http://donttrack.us directly acknowledges that search queries can be used to personally identify individuals. I therefore understood from the later statement on that site, "[ddg doesn't] store any personal information at all", that this would include search queries: ddg almost literally advertises itself on the fact that it doesn't save search queries. (According to the small print, I understood this wrong.) It would be a shame if your explanation was the correct one.
    - dekz 12y ago
      But that is in conjunction with a browser fingerprint right? I don't follow that DDG not being able to save anonymous queries disregards their stance on privacy? Surely for the best experience you'd want DDG to do this anonymously.
    - germano 12y ago
      By the grandparent's description, the difference would be that DDG is not saving the ip address and browser information associated with the search query. If they're only saving the frequency of each search query and nothing else, then there would be no way to see for a particular user/browser/ip address what search queries have been performed because that dimension to the data simply doesn't exist.
    - crazypyro 12y ago
      I think the difference here is that there is no association of the search term with a specific search. If they see a term, they simply add 1 to the counter. Of course, that is probably vastly simplifying it. Basically, your search is thrown into a pool with all of the other searches. It possibly never even has an id associated with it. Just a frequency number. For example, say I start to type "movie t", it'll see that often times after the word "movie", "times" appears at a high frequency so that could be one of the suggestions. I don't see how this introduces a privacy issue unless they are saving the searches by some personal identification number (whether thats an ip, user id, computer, etc), which they specifically deny. Without the specific identifier, there is no way to say it was user A who searched for "movie times" 300 times in a row and not 300 different users searching for "movie times"
Pacabel 12y ago
Could this be a feature that is disabled by default, but that can be easily enabled if a user does wish to use it? I don't know the best way to do this, but I'm thinking a checkbox somewhere near the search bar, or perhaps a prefix similar to "g!" that'll enable it for any further text that's entered, or something along those lines.

andrey-p 12y ago

Fully agree, these were the same things that popped in my head when I saw it. Though I have to say autocomplete for !commands is an excellent addition.