Care about search privacy? Duck Duck Go no longer logs IPs.
gabrielweinberg.com
gabrielweinberg.com
And I mean, I value privacy. I do. But, I value the quality of the search results even more than whatever privacy is lost from search engines logging, I guess. Unless there is some path to improvement, all I can ever see myself using Duck Duck Go for is porn, tips on murdering my spouses, and information on illegal drugs. Of course, other people would use it for much more-- but for me, there something truly wonderful about being able to search for "nose" and have the first result be a unit test runner I want to use, not a piece of anatomy I already know everything I need to about. Sure, it's stupid-- I should search for "nose tests", but I sometimes make mistakes, and here Google doesn't even need to say so and make me try again. It finds the target anyway, without problems (and the less-likely Wikipedia article is right below, as result #2). Without Google logging what I searched for and building a profile, this wouldn't be possible.
I don't mean to be fanboyish and loving of Google (they do scare me sometimes). If they added some sort of feature that said, "don't record anything I do right now with these searches", I would be very happy. But, similarly, I would also be happy if Duck Duck Go at least had an option to opt-in to logging and monitoring and so on. On my end, I would consider my relatively minimal, and explicitly given, loss of privacy to be worth it to help make a search engine I am using better (assuming, of course, that I'm using it-- and I'm not opposed to trying something new to me).
I do plan to eventually have accounts, i.e. opt-in features.
And as for results, I would suggest you try it for a week or so and see for yourself.
Of course they did not get worse because of the personalizing (though the location-based stuff absolutely has to go away - we have browser language strings for that, don't try to guess what I want if I have a way to tell you what I want), but I do think they did pretty well before they did all that, so I see no reason why DuckDuckGo can't as well and wish them the best.
This kills me when traveling. There's ways around it, but it's a bit of a hassle. Really one of my only hassles with Google, though I understand it probably serves 99%+ of searches better.
Another data point... Our userbase at RescueTime is comprised almost entirely geeks. We measure and store second-by-second attention data on their computer. We make all sorts of privacy features available (ability to delete bits of data, track only whitelisted stuff, etc., etc.). The VAST majority of our users never touch any of these features.
And we're growing like gangbusters.
I think people who make the bet that people in the future are going to be increasingly privacy-conscious are making a pretty bad bet... But I do imagine that it will continue to be a niche (though likely a shrinking one).
The increasing fact is that the more Google knows about you, the better they can serve up search results (and ads, of course). I think most users would NOT opt-out given the chance to do so (if it meant harming their search quality).
Related quote from Matt Cutts' blog:
"It’s a long article, but an example useful fact is that if X is the number of people who visit the Ad Preferences page and opt out, 10X people don’t opt out and 4X people actually edit their categories to improve the targeting relevance of the ads they see. Let me say that again: four times as many people change their settings to make their ads more relevant than opt out of interest-based targeting. I think the Ad Preferences page is a good example where users get more transparency and control regarding their privacy."
- An insurance company somehow gets their hands on search data and finds a way to associate that with their customers, figures out who is probably about to apply for coverage for a bunch of expensive treatments and cancels their insurance before they can make the claim for some trumped up reason.
- A political party gets their hands on this information and datamines it to the hilt in order to figure out which talking points to trot out on what TV stations in order to swing a maximum block of voters to them.
I'm sure there will be people that will say both of these are unrealistic, but I think that given the amount of data out there it is only a matter of time before someone will find a way to abuse it in a way that we will not be able to ignore.
You mean like the AOL search data leak? I never read anything about insurance companies misappropriating the data in this manner. So I'd say its more of a long shot.
Same with political parties... again, never read anything like that.
Not to say that it hasn't happened, I'd be curious if anyone has any information to show if it has?
However there has been a lot of discussion about this recently - especially regarding search. I think there is a fair number of people for whom anonymous searching is important and that is only likely to get larger.
And as said, this is probably the least privacy conscious the internet has ever been. Most people just don't care (They're also the ones clicking on ads).
I honestly thought this was an ironic response to the second article!
Not asking because of privacy, just curious about the technology. If you've answered these questions already somewhere, sorry!
He also answered some questions on HN here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=525048
Combine that with a few other hints, and you've got something interesting.
Maybe you could distill it to a very simple description, like IE6 or FF3.5? I wouldn't have thought you'd want to drop knowing which browsers your users are using.
I would consider using Duck Duck Go if nothing was logged. Right now I use another service precisely because they don't log anything.
Most search companies want to identify you. The problem is keeping them from having too many records.
I'm not convinced they want to do it for any malicious/profit based motive.
They want to identify me to give me a better user experience, sure.
Being able to identify users searching on a search engine doesn't suddenly mean it's easier to monetize. Google would still make billions from the adverts next to search results regardless of how identifiable users are. It's not related to their bottom line.
I guess I just don't buy the conspiracy theories on it.
Even if that company would forever be good, they could still have their servers infiltrated into or stolen, or some government could decide that they want the data over night.
* Computer could have been compromised
* Wifi/local network could have been compromised
* Your ISP could have been compromised
* Some of the peers on the internet between your ISP and google "
* The datacenter where Googles servers are
I'd guess that the most common privacy theft is at the first 2 steps - local computer / wifi network.
Any one of those could happen, someone could be logging all your searches + all internet traffic in some of those cases.
Personally though, "What I've searched for" is in the 'meh don't care if anyone knows this' bucket for me.
Similarly, I care more about individual users PCs getting compromised than Google getting hacked.
It's about what that amount of data about a whole country 's population could be used for.
http://consumerist.com/2006/08/aol-user-927-illuminated.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_scandal
In the end you're either part of that set or your not. What's bothering people is not having a choice.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
So you'll catch a small niche of crazies (but small in the scope of the Internet may still be pretty big) and maybe get yourself in some more people's minds as "that place to search if I ever need to run search queries that might get subpoenaed."
The solution, though, is NOT to invest lots of time, energy, and money into make people think of you as better for privacy. You're currently the only search engine that logs so little, so you've got that niche (within people who know about you). Go court some other niches and work on making your overall product better.
As an aside, there are a couple issues with companies and reputation. First is that a company might risk its reputation if the rewards are worth it. Second is that a company might care about its reputation but simply fail to hold true to it. Finally, a company might care about its reputation some of its employees might not.
What they do is explained here: http://www.scroogle.org/ and here https://ssl.scroogle.org/sslnote.html
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/search-engines/
Didn't see it there.
*Edit: Just kidding, that's not what you meant. Leaving this comment for those who don't know where to add DDG to their Firefox search engines.
find ~/.mozilla -name "*duck*"
Great work epi0Bauqu!
I am curious which of these will grant more privacy and better searches.
Best of luck though. Seems like a good publicity strategy.
If I didn't have a basic level of trust with google I wouldn't use the service. I can apply that same basic level of trust with duckduckgo.
Once you apply that unbiased trust, you have two services: one that uses a variety of technology to protect the information they collect and one that doesn't collect information at all and takes steps to prevent others from doing the same.
Google might get bought out. Google might be subject to a sopoena. A google employee might steal something. Google might make a mistake. Any one of those things might prevent Google from fulfilling the basic promise of "we won't misuse your data." They won't ever have to lie or do anything evil. They might just make a mistake, and all your data will be there, vulnerable.
The one little issue is that IP traffic passes through a whole pile of routers before reaching your target, so if you really care about your privacy that much then you should probably use https.
> you should probably use https
Not sure if this is what you're implying, but https://duckduckgo.com is mentioned in the article.
SSL connection. Nothing logged. When I don't care about results personalization, and if I get results I am looking for, DDG has the superior service.
Today, if an employee working for Big Evil uses google to do a search for "Software Developer open positions near Cambridge, MA", that search will likely be logged by websense and the internet firewall. That information might be found and used against you by a political enemy (when you work for Big Evil, political enemies emerge from the woodwork).
A search made over an ssl connection won't log the details.
This came about from comments on reddit. I gave it a lot of thought over the past few days and decided to pull the trigger.