Hacker News Reader

Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

Bing would be unable to associate series of queries with users.

As long as DDG are doing it properly (and I believe they are), Bing would only learn that the contents of each individual query are associated together, they would learn nothing about which other queries were performed by the same user.

View on HN

I think the concern isn't necessarily that Bing would associate query X with person Y. The concern is that Bing would even know that query X exists. For example, if Bing saw a spike in searches for "Aramco IPO July 4, 2018" and were to reveal it to a human or store it, that might be a serious leak of non-public information. Many searches reveal private information, even when they aren't associated with a user.

> if Bing saw a spike in searches for "Aramco IPO July 4, 2018" and were to reveal it to a human or store it, that might be a serious leak of non-public information

Maybe I'm missing something obvious here, but how is that any different from Google or DuckDuckGo seeing the same spike?

Well you might trust DDG as a good actor but not a third party. To discover that this information is discoverable to a third party (even if un-attributable) would breach their trust in DDG. Whether that's reasonable or DDG are misleading people in that regard is another matter. Personally I still use them a lot, and will continue.

I just think there is a point to be made here. Even generally it's often opaque what third parties have what data and I don't really think GDPR has fixed that. It's surprising for people the Bing might have the contents of their DDG search history, somewhere in the huge dataset of DDG searches that pass through.

Also they might not want to help improve Bing search but I'm guessing they do inadvertently?

There's no practical technology that would get around that problem.

Homomorphic encryption might do the trick (?), but it's too slow at the moment.

Intel SGX is only answer at the moment. The Signal messenger uses it, do address book matching is private. It requires the user to trust the server hardware vendor (Intel) instead of also the cloud provider.

That would not stop the Bing query matcher (or indeed the Signal address book matcher) from being able to look at the contents of its own secure enclave.

The trick is that every user uploads his own matcher. The server only sees encrypted matchers, feeds them data and returns the encrypted results. You as a user decrypt your results and nobody (except Intel) was able to see them.

thta has little to do with privacy though. and i believe thats the only thing they assure?

I think that’s pretty far fetched. Such a spike would most likely be the product of an already very well known rumour.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com