
DuckDuckGo's privacy abuses – current, historic, and by proxy - mercer
https://dev.lemmy.ml/post/31321
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laumars
I'm all for holding businesses to account but the arguments made on that site
are pretty poor. For example, why should it matter that DDG uses Microsoft
Outlook for their corporate emails? That has no baring on the DDG's ability to
deliver a more privacy-focused search.

The expectation some people have about how some businesses or projects should
be run is a little absurd.

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TheChaplain
Indeed. That and the wording of the text make it look more like a "hit piece"
against DDG.

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AnonC
I don't know what to think of partnering with Bing and Yahoo or for using AWS.
I don't see those as particularly bad for a search engine that's starting from
scratch. Maybe we should expect more from DDG since it's no longer the new kid
on the block and has money to reduce or eliminate such dependencies.

I always take care of cookies and tracking to the extent I can. So I don't
know what else I can do to avoid using DDG or even Google (which I resort to
for searches where DDG is inadequate).

 _> DDG is currently collecting users’ operating systems and everything they
highlight in the search results. (to verify this, simply hit F12 in your
browser and select the “network” tab. Do a search with javascript enabled.
Highlight some text on the screen. Mouseover the traffic rows and see that
your highlighted text, operating system, and other details relating to
geolocation are sent to DDG. Then change the query and submit. Notice that the
previous query is being transmitted with the new query to link the queries
together)_

FWIW, I couldn't find this behavior (or maybe I didn't figure out how to
exactly check this) even when blocking nothing on DDG. Can someone confirm if
this is true (or was true in the past but no longer true)?

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bm3719
Just tried, and it's true. Two REST calls to improving.duckduckgo.com are
made. Can't tell if my OS and location is encoded in the query params, but
there's at least a dozen or so populated fields.

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bad_user
I'm super skeptical of DuckDuckGo, but most of that is circumstantial and
childish.

Apparently you're abusing privacy if you're using AWS from "privacy-abuser
Amazon", or Outlook for your email, or selling T-shirts on a Cloudflare-
powered website.

By that definition 99% of online businesses are abusing user privacy.

~~~
Pedrit0
Hi. Why are you generally skeptical about DDG ?

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Pedrit0
Does someone have the knowledge / expertise to dig into these critics ? Well,
the critics about partnerships and Cloudflare look like low level activism BS,
but am interested in what is said under the section "Direct Privacy Abuse" in
the article. Are these statements true and do we have to worry about that ?

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vertex-four
I have no idea what this site is, but it won't load for me, at all - I just
get a spinning circle for a few minutes. Ublock Origin doesn't claim to be
blocking anything, so I don't know what's going on.

~~~
bad_user
JavaScript-powered publication fear mongering about privacy, classic.

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robjan
It's not a publication, just a post on some reddit clone

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nieve
Having seen parts of the original Names Database code my only objection to
DuckDuckGo is that somehow it might have been contagious and infected DDG when
Gabriel Weinberg launched the latter. This seems unlikely, but it was the most
unfortunate Perl code I've seen in my career. On the other hand it _worked_,
so perhaps I shouldn't judge it too harshly.

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pixxel
Oof, that’s not a pretty read for DDG. So now what!?

Often I look at people around me who are blissfully unaware of data mining
etc. and feel envious. It’s tiring.

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LetThereBeNick
Does “uses the Bing API” mean that the search results are all fetched from
Bing? As in DDG doesn’t have it’s own search algorithm? I’m surprised

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bad_user
Crawling the web is expensive, barrier to entry is very high.

Many alternative search engines claim to have built their own crawler, however
their coverage is small and they have to fallback to Bing or Google.

You can actually check this btw. The results on Bing are identical to
DuckDuckGo's in many cases, which are often inferior to those of Google. When
different make sure the "location" parameters are the same and clear Bing's
cookies, although local searches are absolutely terrible in Bing/DDG anyway.
But they sometimes diverge on some queries, either because DuckDuckGo's cache
is not up to date, or because it had relevant results in its own index.

But yes, if Bing closes its API, DuckDuckGo either switches to Google or it's
dead in the water.

