this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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But he’s actually right. It does serve ads and it uses bing trackers despite them claiming they don’t track you.
They block Bing trackers.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/microsoft-trackers-run-afoul-of-duckduckgo-get-added-to-blocklist/
Relative vs absolute concern here. Google is absolutely terrible, just in the past 24 hours we've learned more of their insidious methods. DDG is relatively saintly, compared to most other public search engines
Don’t get me wrong. I am not advocating for google here. They are basically evil. The truth is that DDG does collect data and serve ads. By doing so that means they are not private like they advertise. Just do a search. Your first results will be marked as ad spots. The only way to get around this is to use a search engine aggregator such as searx or something self hosted then have lots of people use that to obscure the collection and profile generation. Point is DDG is not a golden child here. It’s a company just like any other in data mining markets.
Also DDG is US based and has to submit to all the privacy invading American agencies. And they could be under a gag order nobody would ever know.
If privacy was a genuine concern for DDG they would have never based their business in the US.
Where should it be based then? I feel like you can't trust any state to not do this sort of thing to fight "terrorism" and "crime"
I would say Switzerland.
They have great privacy laws and a culture of secrecy from their banking history.
They definitely would have an NSA equivalent but with far less reach I would think. They are a "neutral country" as I see it so they don't need such a strong foreign spy agency...
At the very least, the US would be one of worse choice possible for privacy that's for sure.
Keep in mind that the spying done by the NSA was fully legal there. They had this whole framework of laws to justify and authorize it.
I mean the NSA intercepting CISCO routers to bug them ?
That's a bold move that most countries couldn't do...
https://www.infoworld.com/article/2608141/snowden--the-nsa-planted-backdoors-in-cisco-products.html
This sounds a little tinfoil-hat-y but I don't really know what I'm talking about.
It was done in the past for larger US based businesses. I don't see why it couldn't be done with DDG.
Also, if your businesses is under a gag order the most logical thing to do is to act like nothing is happening. Because for DDG privacy IS the product. They don't have better results than Google they are trying to differentiate through privacy (or the appearance of privacy).
Interesting, thanks for the insight.
Can you recommend a search engine that doesn't do that?
Well there is always the possibility to host it yourself (like on a raspberry pi), like SearxNG.
Yeeeah, no one except the most paranoid people will do that.
Well yeah, paranoid but also people who are sick of providing valuable data(capital) to a business model that thrives on the worst traits of the internet.