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DuckDuckGo will use Apple Maps

spreadprivacy.com

961 pointsshritesh468 comments

Some paint it as if the main reason to switch was privacy (https://www.imore.com/duckduckgo-switches-apple-maps-because... "DuckDuckGo switches to Apple Maps, because privacy"), but the previous map provider was mapbox (openstreetmap plus commercial sources) and I doubt mapbox collected more data than Apple is now.

DDG's main marketing model is talking about how they believe Google is privacy threat, so they'll highlight that angle in any change.

Or Apple's marketing team lead to a donation to DDG to make it possible

Why does the glass always have to be half empty? Maybe Apple simply was the better choice?

DDG's entire schtick was privacy and they are switching from open data + commercial sources to a commercial company.

Isn't Apple's map data based on OSM too?

It is, at least in part.

A lot of it came from TomTom.

Is a "commercial" company inconsistent with privacy?

Is it though? A few months ago Apple Maps gave me wrong directions going from Custer State Park to Mt. Rushmore (two major tourist locations relatively near one another).

At least here in western Norway, Mapbox’s directions are incredibly buggy, to the point where they’ll send you on a 150-kilometre scenic drive (including two ferries) to avoid a tunnel instead of going 15 kilometres straight through the mountain. This is apparently because they’re rolling their own telemetrics-based data on top of the OSM road network.

Then again, Apple Maps (on DuckDuckGo) seems to think I that want my maps labelled in Indonesian, so you may still have a point.

Privacy aside, Apple maps, in my experience, are definitely worse than Google in terms of actually corresponding to reality. Apple Maps navigation also takes me on convoluted routes far more often than Google does.

My own experience ( North east US) has been somewhat different recently.

Yes routes from Apple maps, may appear longer or more convoluted at first glance. However after using it ( due to CarPlay) for a while on routes I had previously regularly done using google maps, I inferred a reasoning for that.

On the ~90 minute journey to my in-laws, the predicted journey time, is generally advertised as being quicker on google, but in practice the time difference is marginal.

What was different in my experience anyway, is that Apple maps seems to try to minimize left turns where appropriate. The benefit being a noticeably less stressful journey.

Has anyone else noticed this?

I can’t speak to left turns, but someone attempted a careful evaluation of the turn-by-turn options and Apple’s estimates were generally more conservative, leading to the conclusion that you point out, that Apple looked slower but wasn’t.

To be fair, the glass is often full of gasoline.

That and from a purely data privacy angle, Apple is legitimately better than Google.

Are they or do you just believe that because of what you think you know about the difference between the two companies?

Apple's business model is not selling your data for advertisements. They make their money the old-fashioned way - charging customers for their product (hardware).

I'm currently on my first iPhone. They spell out what they do with data in just about every app and setting. There's an almost annoying number of modals related to privacy and general control of data.

Maybe it's all for show, but they seem to take privacy seriously.

Afaik Apple went above and beyond to make sure their original iPhone fingerprint sensor never leaked the fingerprint to any app or even the OS itself. Android always just did whatever with the print.

If that's the same philosophy now, Apple is definitely better than Google in terms of privacy.

Full disclosure: I own an Android device and no Apple product except an iPod from 2009 or so.

Is it really private though if it's all being collected, encryption and all, to be decrypted at a future date when the technology is available? All data on the net is captured by the NSA and stored at multiple data centers. One's in Utah. No company can really claim privacy if their product touches the internet since all of the pipes are tapped. It's all semantics. Maybe saying "we don't directly..." or "we don't make it easy..." would be more accurate. There is no privacy on the net, period. It's temporary privacy in the immediate present at best. 5 years from now? They might be able to decrypt everything from the last 10 years that they already have stored. It's guaranteed at some point. 6 years ago Snowden also revealed Apple was on board with the data collection. They are lying, and people don't care and go along with the show. https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/01/21/nsa-leaker-edward...

Except they don’t send it over the internet and it never leaves the device

My larger point was about all of the data, not biometrics specifically. Great, your fingerprint never left the device. Everything else does, which is probably way more personal data than just a fingerprint. Your fingerprint really does me no good unless I want to try to frame you for a crime, or want to get into your specific device or other thing that requires biometrics (maybe your work). Your data, I can make use of a lot of if I were criminally inclined. Your credit card numbers, your ssn, your investment accounts, your pics for making false ID's, passwords, or any other data that has ever flowed from your device. You'd have to be pretty sophisticated to be able to make use of someones fingerprints, while basically anyone could use your credit card number. Which is more valuable and larger vector for exploit?

None of the data you describe ever leaves the device unless you opt in to syncing it to iCloud (which is not on by default). The FaceID/Fingerprint never leaves the device and if you don't enable iCloud syncing of the other data off the device the data is unreachable with keys kept on the device.

Its reasonable to think things encrypted today with good methodologies are likely to remain secure forever.

NSA can't change the fundamental laws of the universe. While cryptology and mathematics is constantly advancing, there hasn't been a fundamental breakage of a block cipher in ages, nor has any evidence emerged to suggest the fundamentals of RSA will be broken.

Computing power alone isn't enough to break todays strong cryptography, and its certainly possible that the underlying math is a constant of the universe.

Edit: Not to mention the snowden leaks suggests that the NSA spends most of their effort subverting implementations rather than the fundamental mathematics.

Because Tim Cook, as a homosexual, has teared up when speaking about human rights abuses of homosexual under repressive regimes, and how as the CEO of apple, he will do anything within his power to ensure your data stays safe on apple infra / hw because he personally thinks about it. Can't remember the interview, but it was quite touching actually.

He's very clear in shareholder calls / letters and in their privacy policy. So much so that he even calls out the competition[1] for doing it as Apple does not. From an economics standpoint, Apple doesn't make money on your data. They sell you overpriced but quite sophisticated hardware and became one of the most valuable companies in the world doing this. That and he advocates for a US equivalent of the GPDR[2] which absolutely and directly would impact the bottom line of companies like Google and Facebook.

Then there is Apple's official privacy policy, where they are very explicit that they don't gather personal information to sell to advertisers. In much of the non-US world, saying that and not following that is blatantly illegal.

[1] http://time.com/5433499/tim-cook-apple-data-privacy/

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/24/18017842/tim-cook-data-p...

[3] https://www.apple.com/privacy/

"Homosexual" is not strictly offensive, but does mark you as potentially holding regressive views. It's easy enough to see from context that you're probably okay, but you can't always count on context.

You can just say gay.

-- Signed, The Gays

I just assumed it was the PC version, like African American. No offense meant

-- Signed, totally a friend of the Gays

To those of us who are, it sounds excessively clinical, most of us dont like thinking of our sexuality in a clinical way. Also the poster is not wrong, talking about homosexuality, is cool and okay, calling someone a homosexual is often a language flag that they may be less than open minded.

This might all be true, but is there ever going to be a point where we assume positive intent? We shouldn’t be inferring deep-seeded psychological attributes in every day communication. It’s super likely that nothing at all was meant by using the clinical term.

I didnt see a lack of good faith in the discussion, it was more of a "hey, you might wanna know, that using that particular word associates you with this group you might not want association with" - which if anything is an assertion that requires good faith to make.

For sure, TIL! Thanks random hn gay person!

we're getting super off topic here, but my understanding is that 'black' is actually becoming more PC and acceptable largely because many black people are neither African nor American

I can't reply to your other one because of HN max-thread rules, but yeah. My wife has a masters in social work, or as we like to joke, is a professional social justice warrior. Keep fighting the good fight.

So how should he have said it?

Speaking on behalf of all gays? Even if you’re gay, I’d be pretty sure you’re mostly just capable of speaking for yourself. Either way it’s a bummer you were offended.

Homosexuals don't have some special monopoly on honesty, nor are they immune to using emotional string pulling when they try to get you to believe what they are saying.

The reply would have been better without the first paragraph.

Regardless, Apple do collect lot of personal data. And even if they don't sell it or use it for marketing now, they could still potentially lose control of it, or change their policies down the road.

The safest approach from a privacy perspective is not to collect the data in the first place.

> Homosexuals don't have some special monopoly on honesty, nor are they immune to using emotional string pulling when they try to get you to believe what they are saying. The reply would have been better without the first paragraph.

I believe the point was that he was advocating for a cause which doesn't benefit him or directly affect him. I think it's a valid point: it's easy to fight for things that benefit you. It's like you'd be less skeptical if a rich person fights for higher taxes on the rich than when a poor person does.

I'm an attorney and have worked with several financial institutions drafting policies/statements/investor disclosures about privacy and user data. For most financial institutions user privacy is good for the bottom line but expensive so they tend to do the bare minimum. The bare minimum is not a lot but it's quite a bit more than nothing, which is what most non-medical/non-financial institutions have to do. I've never worked with a tech company on privacy matters but I would expect any company that depends on collecting and monetizing user data to be much more aggressive than the typical financial institution. That said, comparing Apple's privacy policies to those of a financial institution they are truly above and beyond any minimum regulatory standard.

I know most people don't pay them any attention but I'm really not sure you could find a more customer-focused privacy policy. I've yet to find one and I would guess I've read at least 10x as many privacy policies as the average person. Everything from what their disclosures say to how they've structured them to be easily read, easily understood, and (dare I say) engaging is indicative of just how much they prioritize user-privacy.

edit: meant non medical

Thought it was a bit funny, because 10*0=0, most people has probably never read a privacy policy.

Still, good point!

> Because Tim Cook, as a homosexual, has teared up when speaking about human rights abuses of homosexual under repressive regimes

...but is also more than happy to meet and shake hands with the leaders of those repressive regimes? Like the UAE, which criminalizes sodomy and deports those who identify as LGBT?

https://www.thenational.ae/uae/government/abu-dhabi-crown-pr...

Is it possible Apple, like Tim Cook, has the occasional double standard?

Shake hands or resign and let another person lead Apple.

Right, shaking hands is literally an endorsement of everything the country does.

This must blow your mind: https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fnyoobserv...

There's another way to look at it - Tim Cook has managed to get these leaders of repressive regimes to shake hands and do business with an openly gay man who is widely admired.

Tim Cook can only change what he has control over.

He can't change the government of the UAE.

He can change Apple's security and privacy priorities.

This is the same Tim Cook that praised a conference to promote China's "cyber-sovereignty" vision as "developing a a digital economy for openness". Don't forget that Apple is very good at marketing, and will change their message to fit the market.

It's a fair question. For starters, comparing the business models, and how iOS implements privacy relevant aspects vs. how Android does so, might lead to reasonable assumptions.

It is in the best financial interests of Apple to protect user data. Mr. Cook has a fiduciary responsibility to do so.

Apple are primarily a hardware company. They make money on the sale of devices. They also make some money as a marketplace for apps and media. They have no significant revenue from data harvesting or advertising sales.

Google are an advertising company. The overwhelming majority of their revenue is from targeted advertising. Their ability to harvest user data is the primary factor affecting their bottom line.

For Apple, privacy is a no-brainer. It doesn't harm either of their primary revenue streams and it gives them a substantial point of differentiation against their main competitor. Apple have an ongoing commercial imperative to improve the privacy of their products and services; Google have an ongoing commercial imperative to the contrary.

They also make a lot of money in China where betraying their users privacy was required to enter. And that was almost the same week then their CEO, Tim Cook, told on camera that privacy is "fundamental human right". I guess he doesn't consider Chinese people human.

What would you have done?

How about withdrawl, like Google did?

If Apple could see a way to make money out of your data they would do it without blinking. The only reason they went with the privacy angle was that they failed when they tried to build their own ad network.

They failed with their ad network in part because they weren’t willing to share user data with advertisers. You’re conflating correlation and causation.

How so?

Apple shared all their iCloud user data (messages, pics, docs, etc.) and keys with the Chinese government last year. [1] Apple even updated their TOS forcing Chinese users to agree to it or drop service. [2]

Google got flak for just considering it with Dragonfly, but Apple actually did it.

[1] https://mashable.com/article/china-government-apple-icloud-d...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...

Source? iMessage is E2E encrypted so no, Apple did not share that part (or other encrypted data like keychain). They’ve actually gone pretty far in protecting their E2E encryption from adversarial clouds.

Added sources. Apple moved the keys for accessing the data at rest to Chinese servers, which were nationalized by the Chinese government. The Chinese government has access to the users' data at rest and the keys to decrypt it.

I think you are misunderstanding. Apple moved Chinese iClouds to Chinese firms. So yes, Chinese iCloud users in China will be under the full surveillance of the government. Which they always have been. But that has no impact on anyone outside of China.

Dragonfly is a censored search engine, not a user data base.

The Chinese firms were nationalized by the government in July, giving full access. This isn't generic surveillance but complete ownership. First source listed in my original comment.

Dragonfly was complying with China's firewall, because clicking broken links in search results sucks, but it was also linking every search query to the users phone number and sharing with the Chinese government, which is what Google employees revolted over.

This does not affect E2E encrypted data like iMessage. Apple doesn’t have those keys to give.[1]

[1] https://www.apple.com/business/site/docs/iOS_Security_Guide....

Your messages are stored on iCloud, right?

Only if you enable this feature.

Its enabled by default. iCloud backups are automatically opted in since iOS 9.

Backing up messages to iCloud is not on by default. iPhone will ask you if you want to enable it.

Yes but they are now E2E encrypted. Apple rolled out "Messages in iCloud" recently which preserves E2E encryption and excludes messages from regular (not E2E encrypted) iCloud backups.

But since key management is out of your control or visibility, Apple can just add another key to your account on behalf of the government. They don't have to disclose the existing keys on your device. This gets them the messages going forward but not the ones from the past. So they'd have to do this for all Chinese customers ahead of time, rather than as a response to an inquiry.

Anything's possible if the vendor secretly collaborates with a government to insert vulnerabilities and lies about it. But what we're talking about here is, given the way Apple has publicly declared how the system works[1], what can a government do with full server access.

Apple states "All of the user’s registered devices display an alert message when a new device, phone number, or email address is added." So no, it's not correct to say key management is out of your visibility.

[1] https://www.apple.com/business/site/docs/iOS_Security_Guide....

This allows Apple to continue selling their hardware and software to people living in China (of which there are a lot). This is not a problem with Apple, but a problem with China.

Boycotting of countries or not is one thing. Once in a country and following the law, Apple's business model is simply more conducive to privacy. Unlike Google, they are not reliant on the collection and analysis of data. On the contrary, like DDG, they use privacy as a differentiator and advantage. The only thing you can trust about companies is their business models.

If you just cherry pick actions and ignore things such as sharing millions of their users' data with a surveillance state, then sure, they seem privacy focused.

There is a huge difference between complying with a state’s requirements and relying on privacy violation for your business model.

> Apple shared all their iCloud user data (messages, pics, docs, etc.) and keys with the Chinese government last year. [1]

They shared all their Chinese users' iCloud data. It's a huge distinction and I feel like you paraphrased it deliberately to try to make Apple appear to have sold out all of their users worldwide. While what they did in China is terrifying in general, it doesn't compromise security for any Apple user outside of China as you very strongly implied it did.

Here's the very first sentence from the link you posted (emphasis mine):

> A state-owned telecommunications company in China now stores the iCloud data for Apple’s China-based users.

First they came for the Chinese, and I did not speak out— Because I was not Chinese.

Edit: Wikipedia link to original poem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...

More like "First the Chinese government came, and I did not speak out, because they don't care about anyone other than the Chinese."

Challenging your assumptions: 1. Does China only care about Chinese? 2. If the Chinese government was first, who will be second?

The Chinese doesn't even care about the Chinese. Their care about the Communist Party. Everything else comes second.

Google's Dragonfly was the same thing - sharing "only" Chinese user data.

GPs comparison was privacy between the two companies, and one cares more about selling in China than the privacy of it's users.

You are using one instance - sharing Chinese users' data with the Chinese government - as the sole metric for judging a company's privacy policies. That's just as dishonest as the GP paraphrasing the link they cited to make it appear Apple did something they did not.

I'm not defending Apple WRT their data privacy practices in China; as I said it's terrifying and hopefully not a stepping stone. I was simply calling GP out for deliberately misrepresenting their own citation to make a false equivalence.

Sharing millions of users' personal data with a surveillance state notorious for civil rights violations is not a trivial matter, especially in any discussion involving privacy reputation.

If you think there are privacy issues that are more important than that then list them.

And again you are being dishonest. I never said it was a trivial matter, I said it was terrifying. I was calling out a deliberate attempt to falsely claim Apple was doing to all of its customers what they did to its customers in one country but you are trying to twist it into something completely different by putting words in my mouth. Shame on you.

And now that you've brought this discussion into ad hominem territory, it has lost any relevance to the actual topic at hand. Peace.

This is constantly being misreported. No. They. Do. Not. Apple's data is kept on the device and so are the keys. If you enable that data to be put on the cloud (it's an opt-in) then they will also store the key, but otherwise they do not.

Yeah... except actually no.

iMeasage, the one be thing that really matters in this case, encrypts it's chats "end to end" but using keys managed centrally by Apple, regardless of your iCloud sync situation, and manages them in a way that can't inspected by users. If a decrypted copy of all your encrypted chats is being sent to a government sink, there is no way for you to know or prevent it.

China cares about being able to intercept and decrypt your communication, they want to be able to identify and punish political threats. That's a service that Apple CAN provide to the Chinese government for all iPhone customers.

I'm always curious how can people get so confident about Apple's security practices, given that none of the parts are open source? Is the trust solely reputation-based?

why would it be a "donation"? DDG isn't a charity.

How much do you think DDG will pay apple for this?

Or a deal. Perhaps DDG will help Apple out as provider of search data of some kind (like WolframAlpha, or Yelp). Not sure what this could be that Apple can't do themselves though.

If Apple wants to focus more on services it makes sense to onboard people into using their APIs and challenging Google on this developer front too.

The best kind of marketing is marketing based on universally known truth.

Or.. DDG is just a tool in a bigger war in the background. It feels like it can exist only because its benefactors allow it to exist.

It's independently profitable, though.

Because it's basically a reskin of Bing search. They say they index a handful of "sources" which are just individual websites, and also redundant because Bing also indexes them.

With Bing ads even (well actually Bing via Yahoo :))

a reskin with better instant answers and !bangs. Both of those things give me an enormous value add, I could never bring myself to use DDG or Bing over Google if it was just about search results.

Google _is_ a privacy threat. Completely unrelated to DDG, marketing or believe.

One Google with thousand tentacles...

Whether it's true or not doesn't change anything to what the parent comment said.

I'm a bit uncomfortable with how much DDG's marketing is focused on trashing their competition. They deliberately obfuscate privacy issues to strengthen their narrative. Sure duckduckgo is a good company right now, but that's only because they're small. I doubt they'll stay that way when they capture a significant market share.

Why? That's the differentiator they chose to go for. You can argue that's it's dishonest, but i don't see the problem with the marketing.

Personally I find their writing mean... I do not love the super optimistic marketing lingo, but DDG sometimes sounds too vicious in their blog. (I still use them as main search engine, but I am not sure I would like them to go mainstream)

Replace Google with Exxon and privacy with renewable energy, and you'll see why people aren't bothered by this slight against Google. Not all griping is equal. This isn't the same as putting another person down to lift yourself up, or putting another local small business down in order to lift yours up.

I don't pay attention to renewable energy marketing, but I don't think they attack Exxon as much as DDG attacks Google.

I think a closer analogy is health food companies advertising that misrepresents the benefits of organic foods.

I have never seen an organic food commericial. I haven't seen a fruit or vegetable commercial for years.

I have seen products over labelled like the low carb steak or the sugarfree water. These products were always low carb or sugarfree.

DDG attacking google tells us they are shooting for number 2. Attacking google provides free advertising. It also tells us if they get bigger they will double down on being different from google so the chance they will suddenly turn against privacy is unlikely. If it does happen funding is running out.

Yeah, but in this analogy your favorite renewable energy company just announced one of their products is now produced by Chevron. Which is not Exxon and therefore, ostensibly, a huge win for renewables.

Well, they certainly can't compete on search quality.

True

“Certainly”? I doubt the deservedness of that certainty.

DDG satisfies most of my searches on the first go, and I’ve never had success with !g after a failed DDG query.

Furthermore, the Google results has a cluttered design with sparse information, so it takes much longer to figure out that I haven’t found what I’m looking for.

I’d say Google is the one failing to compete on search quality. At one point they did, but now Google’s consumer products compete on brand awareness and price, which they can only do because of their conquests in the advertising industry. Most people are not Google’s customer, they are part of Google’s enterprise product: the attention of people whose data profiles meet various requirements.

Yes, certainly. DDG very often have quite okay results while Google has almost always outstanding results. I have to use !g quite often when searching for a programming or architecture solutions that are just slightly more complex than mainstream. I am using DDG mostly because I trust in the cause. OK, I admit that bangs are nice. That being said, both our comments are just an opinions. I'd gladly see a research about their accuracy.

Remember that "Bing it on" campaign Microsoft ran, to show that in a blind test, users couldn't tell the difference between Bing search results and Google search results?

Well, Microsoft's test completely backfired on me. I ran the test many times. In most cases, one of the columns had clearly better results, and 80+% of the time, that column was Google.

Small sample size to be sure, but it covers 100% of the population I care about in choosing a search engine (me).

Granted, this was Bing, not Google, but I kind of doubt DDG would fare better. (And in non-blind tests, I definitely fell I'm getting the worst results from DDG).

In my experience the difference between Google and DDG results is that when Google has desired page as the first result, DDG will have it somewhere on the first page of results. Definitely not as good, but still very much comparable.

And I also pretty much never have to use !g. DDG results are sufficient most of the time, and when they are not, I notice Google usually also fails to provide satisfactory results.

I use ddg as my primary search. I haven’t counted but my gut says I do a second search on google ~40% or more.

I like ddg, i support them, but for any but the most basic queries google is a solid tier above.

As a DDG user I share your same skepticism. But I also believe that privacy will become a premium feature, even a symbol of status - similar to the iPhone/iMessage today. Poor people will buy devices that are subsidized with "targeted advertisements" and Facebook apps they can't uninstall. The premium market will pay to not deal with this nonsense.

> The premium market will pay to not deal with this nonsense.

And thus stand out for targeting purposes regardless.

Targeting works the more data you have. You could target “well off iOS user” but that’s less invasive than “searched topics of adoption and abortion. Recommend local abortion clinics”. Ya see what I’m getting at here?

If you have few enough users on a given platform, they tend to be identifiable by being so unique. If there's one user who logs in from Chrome in Incognito on an iPhone X via a VPN in North Korea, it's not too hard to fingerprint them, if you're looking for it if course...

> Sure duckduckgo is a good company right now, but that's only because they're small.

Only because they are small? That seems to imply that if they ever get big, they’ll no doubt become evil, privacy-wise. Apple proves that does not have to be the case.

Apple’s main business is hardware, and software that helps sell the hardware. Any revenue from data is likely a seperate, minor stream; and for it to become a significant one, likely requires significant changes in Apple’s operations. Like any other hardware company, they don’t need google’s kind of data collection to make money.

But DDG is primarily funded by search, and the search business is funded by ads, which are more valuable based on targetting quality, which is improved by... data. About the unique user, specifically. For DDG to grow while maintaining search as it’s primary business, it’s difficult to imagine them not eventually (or at least, being heavily incentivized to) approach/mimic google-style of data collection — because data collection is their money maker.

Apple is unique amongst FAANG in being non-data-reliant, from the start; they never had strong incentives to turn to it, and took the opportunity to stand against it, improving their primary business without any immediate loss (they’re hit by opportunity cost for it, but otherwise).

I don’t disagree that DDG might turn evil. What I disagree with is the premise that they are not evil only because they are small.

Apple's Services revenue hit 10 billion per quarter in the last earnings report, and it's growing steadily. Yeah, it doesn't compare to hardware sales, but I don't think it can be called a minor insignificant stream any more, can it?

What does services actually consist of? From [1], it looks like the major components are the app store, iTunes/Music (purchases, I assume) and the iCloud? I'm not seeing the data dependency that would incentivize Apple to look to Google for advice, at least not in this category.

The closest might be recommendation systems, but afaik even Netflix only collects from its own information pools, and the main chunk of it is probably for their custom shows; Amazon definitely doesn't track that much data about their users, because their recommendation system might actually be useful if it did.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Apple_Inc._services

Sure, I am not disagreeing with you. Just pointing out that Apple is making data services work as a revenue stream just fine, without the privacy invasion. Your comment read a little bit like it was implying that Apple's privacy stance is only realistic because they are not making money on services, and if they were making money on services, they would start invading privacy.

Here there is a big difference still, their services are a marketfront. This is a lot different from Youtube for example.

Also keeping an internal profile of registered user is very different from squeezing every cent of advertising out all available user data

Amazon I think tracks whatever it can. Whenever I visit a product, even if I didn't buy it the product (or something similar) will show up as "Continue shopping ...", and not very later as ads on my Facebook feed. It almost creeps me out (I use quite a few filters on uBlock), considering there is no visible facebook "Like" button on Amazon.

Not sure how it works, but whatever I see on Amazon shows up as ads on Facebook.

DDG’s “product” is a privacy centric search. Once they get big why would they throw their product away and become like the competition? That simply does not make any sense because the only reason why most people use them is the privacy aspect.

Good on Apple and DDG for realising that privacy has value and using that to grow their product.

Brin and Page pretty much say it's inevitable that a commerical search engine will succumb to "evil". The only solution they present is an academic/non-profit run search engine.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html (scroll down to "Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives")

The owners of a commercial search engine say that it's inevitable that a commercial search engine will succumb to evil.

Hmmm.

Not to put too fine a point on it, they once said that - the linked paper from Brin and Page was published in 1998, when they were still students.

Notably, though, just a few months before they launched as a commercial operation.

Reminds me of the Onion article:

https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-na...

Sorry for the offtopic, but Im interested in natural Language constructs like this way of using Hmmm. after a sentence. First I thought it was something from the Portuguese speakers, after more thinking I see maybe it is common of French speakers. Or maybe is common in the U.S. too, I have been there only few times. I found it very funny, and somewhat familiar. :ps: The wonders of having a search engine at anyone's hand.

https://www.reddit.com/r/hmmm/about

I think the linguistic term is "interjection". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interjection

So you're not going to apply the "if it's free, you're the product" logic for DDG as well?

Well, the obvious reason is that it may not be possible to get “big” as a search engine, without chipping away at the privacy gaurantees. Even if they get the users, can they sufficiently monetize them without turning into google?

Wouldn't DDG be able to monetize their search engine by simply showing ads relevant to your current search? They don't have to store your search history to do that, and you still get the same privacy.

I believe apple has ridden the hardware train about as far as it goes. There's no money in laptops and desktops anymore. The latest android phones are good enough. The "apple store experience" has become a dystopian nightmare compared to almost any other form of shopping. Constant pressure to increase earnings will inevitably force them to move a larger and larger percentage of their business to data and start striping away privacy features.

A real concern for privacy has only ever existed in the open source world, and google and apple have effectively crushed that threat.

Apple has nearly 1 billion iOS users and 70 million MacOS users. If Apple had invested more heavily in their MacOS ecosystem, rather than letting products like the Mac Pro rot for half a decade, they may have eaten at the marketshare of their competitors.

As is, many of the Mac diehards I know have migrated their kids off the platform in the past year or two, and some have made the leap themselves. Its a sea of change from just a few years ago.

Apple collects and uses data all the time. Their marketing kind of claims they don't, but their privacy policy is very clear that they do.

For example they continuously collect GPS position + list of WiFi APs from iPhone users to build their crowd-source'd wifi location database: "To provide location-based services on Apple products, Apple and our partners and licensees may collect, use, and share precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device. Where available, location-based services may use GPS, Bluetooth, and your IP Address, along with crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower locations, and other technologies to determine your devices’ approximate location."

They also state: "We also use personal information to help us create, develop, operate, deliver, and improve our products, services, content and advertising, and for loss prevention and anti-fraud purposes."

It's quite eye opening to compare how Apple's marketing describes their privacy policy vs. how Apple's legal describes it.

Perhaps research “Differential Privacy” to better understand what they are actually doing.

You are seemingly suggesting that they do Google-style data collection where data is attached to a specific user. It’s a disingenuous interpretation of their privacy policy (both the marketing version and the legal version.)

https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/Differential_Privacy_Over...

What should actually be eye opening is how Apple actually does protect privacy. They should be applauded and not condemned.

What part of handing over keys to iCloud to Chinese govt need to be applauded? The sooner people realize big corportations including Apple, Google will do things to generate profit, the better. Wallstreet, for better or worse, wont be kind if Tim Cook came in and said we decided to forego profit because differential privacy

Apple obeys the laws of the countries is operates in. Are you suggesting they should not?

On your second point, they Tim Cook has already said on their earnings calls that they could have monetized user data if they wanted to and chose not to. In fact they built Apple Maps at huge cost specifically so they would not have to give personal data to Google. They've been very clear about this.

> Apple obeys the laws of the countries is operates in. Are you suggesting they should not?

They can always choose not to operate in those countries. But they do, and accordingly making a conscious decision to endorse those laws in the name of profit.

According to that logic any Western tourist that visits Beijing and goes to Tiananmen Square, as I have, and doesn't wave about pro-democracy banners is 'making a conscious decision to endorse' Chinese censorship laws. So apparently I'm now a Communist shill?

Or are you saying that no foreign companies anywhere should do any business at all in China and no tourists should go there because doing so and obeying the laws is tantamount to taking personal responsibility for them?

By extension, I suppose this means that, by not breaking them, you are personally endorsing every law of the country in which you currently reside, or any countries you have or will ever visit?

1 corporations are not people. Analogies should only be made when there's an actual similarity point.

2 if you're making that point, there's still a difference between action and omission. Nobody would held you accountable if you don't actively try to topple a murderous regime, but if somehow it's laws require to participate in the stoning of a person, well, maybe you should grab a ticket to home instead of a stone, or at least is expected for you to weight the situation, not just shrug and quote: "well, it's the law".

Companies are made up of people, and the people are liable for any laws they violate while conducting the business of the company. Furthermore if companies aren't persons, do they therefore not have any of the obligations or responsibilities of a person, to obey the law, to answer to the courts, to be held to contracts or be the subject of law suits? The argument against corporate personhood is, frankly, utterly incoherent. Clearly they are entities which can have rights and obligations, many of which are similar to and derive from those of the people of which they are composed.

What Apple is doing is more like visiting a country and being told you either have to participate in stoning someone or pay a fine, and they are paying the fine. That's why they won't operate iCloud services in China, which will instead be run by a Chinese company which Apple will have to pay for the service.

Proper analogy is Western tourist coming to China, and filing reports about dissenting Chinese citizens. It's not about waving banners.

Apple built maps, because they couldn’t come to an agreement with google, something about turn by turn. The money exchanged with google probably played a part too

Also, Apple sells the default search provider space on their OS to Google for ~9B/year.

So, does it really matter if Apple doesn't directly operate their advertising business and instead outsources it?

This says nothing about apple selling user data like google of facebook.

We should be more clear in distinguishing various levels of attacks to privacy.

Google doesn't sell user data either, though.

But Apple's privacy policy is very clear that they do share user data and they do use personal information for advertisement purposes: "Apple and its affiliates may share this personal information with each other and use it consistent with this Privacy Policy. They may also combine it with other information to provide and improve our products, services, content, and advertising."

Does Apple collect less data than Google? Almost certainly, Google is crazy good at it. But are they still collecting data and using it for targeted advertising? According to their own privacy policy YES, yes they are. Including tracking people on their websites: "Apple’s websites, online services, interactive applications, email messages, and advertisements may use "cookies" and other technologies such as pixel tags and web beacons. These technologies help us better understand user behavior, tell us which parts of our websites people have visited, and facilitate and measure the effectiveness of advertisements and web searches."

Seriously, just read Apple's privacy policy: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/

It really doesn't match their heavy privacy-first marketing push of late.

And for things like Siri it's hard to imagine that they aren't going to get increasingly creepy on the data collection aspect of things. It's sort of necessary to build out a "real" assistant. Asking things like "What time is my flight?", which is a useful feature, requires it to know when your flight is. Which you probably didn't manually tell it, because that's not very assistant-y, but instead it had to crawl your emails to find it. That ends up being creepy data collection. They could do it purely on-device, but then your homepod can't answer the same question, which breaks the magic. Unless they build some way for the homepod to ask all your other Apple devices. But if all your devices form a collective network that can share data about you between each other is it really "purely local" anymore? And what stops Apple from joining in on that mesh network whenever they want?

I've been seeing comments on HN praising how Apple respects users' privacy etc. Though I have a genuine question: how can we be so confident that Apple follows their claims while their software remain closed-source?

For client-side Google software like Android/Chromium at least we got to fork and remove the evil bits; we have built thriving communities based on that and everyone's got an alternative to Google. In the case of iOS/Safari do we trust Apple-provided binaries solely based on claimed policy / reputation?

Maybe we should start thinking about growth. All kind of bad decisions are taken in the name of growth. Maybe some companies could just provide a service, be profitable and grow just to a natural size not focusing on growth itself. That would require a new way of thinking the role of companies in human society.

This is incompatible with dominant funding models: private VC funding requires that the non-failures get exploited enough to make up for the failures. Publicly traded shares make it impossible to prevent shareholders who think that the company could grow to 10x from buying out those who think that it can or should only grow to x. Employee-owned coops will see their de-facto ruling bureaucrats seek to rule a bigger organisation, because that's the kind of personality who rises into those positions. The only funding model that has a chance to stay "happy-sized" (and where it's even possible that claims like "we care for our customers" are not lies) are owner-run bootstrapped shops and they often enough do stay that way. But for the same reason they hardly ever make it into the news.

Then perhaps we as a society need to engineer more diseconomies of scale.

That because Apple isn't primarily a Web or services company.

Any company who's business revolves around online ads will be tempted to invade your privacy.

See: http://peakads.org

Still, that doesn’t guarantee they’ll turn evil once (if) they are big, which the parent comment seems to imply with the word “only”.

My point is that right now, DDG too small to do any real harm to anyone. Their questionable word choice in announcements and blog posts signal to me that they're willing to take shortcuts to achieve their bottom line. If they grow big enough, these shortcuts will start actually hurting people.

Examples?

> Apple proves that does not have to be the case.

By handing over all iCloud data of Chinese users to the Chinese government?

You surely must be jesting!

Oh gosh, a company in China follows Chinese law! The outrage!

Regardless what your view is, are you seriously suggesting companies should break the laws of the countries they operate in?

Before you say: “unjust laws, yes!” Consider what laws Chinese consider unjust, should they be allowed to break them within the US?

I would err on the side of: if you don’t agree with the values of a country then don’t offer your services. Capitalism, of course puts no value on values, so profit is the only ethical code a business should follow (logically).

Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

A company decides to do business in China knowing that it means handing over all data on Chinese users to the Chinese government.

This company is:

1) Apple?

2) Google (project Dragonfly)?

Make no mistake, Apple is a multi-national megacorp just like Google and Microsoft, and is heavily influenced by shareholder sentiment. When push comes to shove, they will bow to political pressure, as exemplified by Tim Cook's praise for China's conference promoting "cyber-sovereignty" as "a digital economy for openness", and their ceding of China iCloud keys to China servers.

Oh please! Apple may not represent the same privacy clusterfuck that Google does, but that doesn't make them good. They still are absolutely abhorrent with regards to vendor lock-in and planned obsolescence.

So in response to “this company isn’t bad in this particular area” your argument is “Oh please! They may not be bad in that area, but what about all these unrelated areas where they are bad”?

I always hear so much about lock-in with Apple and using their platforms extensively alongside other ones I’m curious as to what examples people are actually thinking of.

Apple does business in China. So not a good case for privacy.

>Apple proves that does not have to be the case.

Apple was part of the PRISM program.

Apple is a hardware company from the start, their strategy has been fixed long before other Internet companies figured the value of customer data.

Their narrative of being privacy enforcer aids their strategy of building closed systems.

I'm not telling Apple is deceiving its customers with the privacy narrative, but it isn't a guardian of privacy either; if it was it wouldn't have entered CHINA like other comments have pointed out.

> Sure duckduckgo is a good company right now, but that's only because they're small

Is this opinion or fact?

> when they capture a significant market share.

but they haven't built a better mousetrap, and they're up against the greatest mousetrap ever known to mankind

Plus they could easily survive for decades fulfilling only the niche market who cares about privacy. They may never need to be the "big fish", which will involve compromising their users security, and therefore lose a lot of their value proposition.

Even having 1-5% of the search market is a pretty great business. Not everyone needs to be Google-scale to be a success.

Eh...Google even 5 years ago was 10x more useful to me than they are now. No exaggeration.

Even Search has become markedly less useful, a common story around here, to the point where even nonbubbled proxied Startpage.com searches are disappointing.

Maps becomes less reliable all the time from a user perspective (in my immediate region, to cover my ass I guess).

Chromecast and YouTube, in general and in conjunction, have become...bloated, buggy, user-tracking-first embarrassments of their original versions...don't get me started on Gmail.... if you're gonna take all my info, at least be good at your services. Especially the ones I pay for.

I remember there was a time when googling was so intelligent it seemed like it was going to become self aware! Dunno what happened along the way but the last few years it’s like a giantfairly sophisticated grep coupled with a bunch of sponsored links.

SEO happened.

All that tells me is that the problem space evolved and Google didn’t keep ahead of it. Same as what happened to Yahoo(!) before them ... my point was that Google was a very intelligent platform and now less so. Perhaps they just decided they could coast on the SEO ...

sometimes I feel that way, but a quick trip to DDG or Bing reminds me that while Google has felt regressive, they are still the kings of showing me what I want up front.

As mostly a casual user of these products, can you speak to how search and maps have degraded?

This is balloney. For a regular user google is 10x better than it ever was. Search intent, voice search, user based predictions. Get real. I understand quote searching for lines of code doesnt work like it used to but thats not where google makes money

Does anyone know if there's folks working to build a better mousetrap where search is a protocol that anyone could use, not a company service?

If you are thinking about decentralized search, it already exists in some P2P networks (ex: Kademlia)

However, it is nowhere as effective as commercial services. So much that the most effective way of finding pirate stuff is often to Google them despite all the copyright takedowns.

Like when Google were little and their actual tagline was "Do No Evil".

The tag line was actually « Don’t be evil ». It was never an official motto afaik.

You’ve reminded me of Apple’s adverts at the beginning of the 2nd coming - the Mac guy and the PC guy.

When you’re deeply in the underdog position I think that style is ok, but at a certain point it becomes a bit gross.

Yeah, but so is about anything else. Google doesn't share that information, that's a huge principle of their company. Also, DDG is small, so it can be easily exploited.

When Google announced to their advertising customers that they were buying everyone's credit card data, that was my own personal bridge too far.

>Google has been able to track your location using Google Maps for a long time. Since 2014, it has used that information to provide advertisers with information on how often people visit their stores. But store visits aren’t purchases, so, as Google said in a blog post on its new service for marketers, it has partnered with “third parties” that give them access to 70 percent of all credit and debit card purchases.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607938/google-now-tracks-...

Perhaps other search engines will reach this extreme level of creepy behavior in the future, but Google is there today.

That's a very misleading way of putting it. From your own article:

> In addition, Google does not know what products people bought.

Of course not. Whose credit card statement includes a listing of the individual items you purchased at a store during a particular transaction?

It's not in the statements that you received, it's a reciprocity agreement between retailers and CC companies to share the data by CC #

For example, CC companies could give you your itemized purchase history for Macy's on your statement, if they wanted to.

It is my understanding that most stores do not share that data, because they feel it is a significant commercial advantage.

Credit card companies have wanted itemized transactions for aaages (it's even part of the protocols they use) for fraud prevention, but very few merchants have agreed.

Not for SMBs, but major retailers share the information keyed of CC# as part of reciprocity agreements, including Amazon.

yeah, but they wouldn't be switching from openstreetmap to apple maps if they cared about privacy.

They don't just believe Google is a privacy threat, they know it. We all do. You don't have to use weasel words when discussing a known quantity.

Is Google not a privacy threat?

I think an interesting question is how much of it is because of Apple starting to lean on privacy as a differentiator, rather than DuckDuckGo continuing to do so.

Is it just me or does the map-link go to yelp.com? Why are we even talking about Apple here when it's yelp getting the clicks?

This is terrible...

Apple Maps on iOS/macOS shows Yelp photos and reviews of places.

Yeah, but this is not iOS exclusive.

This is affecting everybody using DDG.

At some point their place search was powered by Yelp.

The flip side with Mapbox is that they probably weren't collecting any less data either.

Whether or not Mapbox collects more data is an interesting question. My guess would be they do, by a lot.

If you look at their website, Mapbox is all about "live" location data, insights, etc. The days of them just being a provider of nice services built around (mostly) open data are probably over. They have a huge userbase and can leverage all that data to do powerful things.

CEO of Mapbox said at State of the Map US 2018 that they are continuously collecting lots of location data (which they use to improve the map). They do not believe this amounts to the collection of personal data.

Apple needs it's own search engine. This is step 1.

What if they just bought DDG?

I expect most DDG users would stop using it. Apple may be the "least bad" of the big players when it comes to privacy, but I have no trust in them and no interest in using their services.

It would probably make a lot of sense for Apple though, and I'm sure they'd convince more Apple loyalists to switch to DDG from Google by putting their name on it.

Then Apple would have to give up the truckloads of money they get from Google for making them the default search engine on Safari.

Wow, I hope they buy DDG

Good point. I like DuckDuckGo, but lately, their decisions make me wonder what's their direction.

The only way they promote themselves is only by comparing DuckDuckGo to Google

As a user, the deciding point is quality of google maps versus the reality of the claim of privacy with apple maps. I have a hard time believing that current users of duckduckgo completely escaped google's data collection over the decades and by choosing to use apple maps have dramatically reduced their privacy exposure with a measurable impact on their lives.

According to Mapbox Privacy Policy (https://www.mapbox.com/privacy/), they collect a lot of data, including: (a) IP address, (b) device and browser information, (c) operating system, (d) the content of the request, (e) the date and time of the request, and (f) limited location and usage data.

I wish they were explaining why they moved away from Mapbox and OSM in general!

I believe Apple at least augments their data with OSM data; however, I suspect the primary driver of this decision was price.

Edit: request are succeeding for me now.

Apple employee spoke at a recent OSM conference. Yes, they use OSM data as well. In some countries more than others. Apple also has a fulltime staff working on OSM. https://github.com/osmlab/appledata/issues, https://github.com/osmlab/appledata/

Apple can only use OSM data pre license change which is very old now, those links are to contributions Apple is making to OSM (similar to the big Microsoft contributions) which are probably there as a way of trying to prevent a Google monopoly, but not indications that Apple is using the data.

That’s not true. Apple is using and contributing current, ODbL-licensed OSM data.

How does that work? Do you mean using it behind the scenes? I thought ODbL prevented combinations unless the combined dataset could be released.

It's not as broad as "combinations". In many circumstances that doesn't apply. The OSMF website has guidelines on what needs to be released and what doesn't.

I dont see why this was needed - it is a regression in terms of usability and performance (loading performance - cant comment on quality of the maps just yet, but I understand from others that the map data is woeful).

Really disappointed. I used to recommend DDG to everyone, but this feels like a sell-out - without any justification for why they've done it, my mind just leaps to conclusions about marketing and trying to get "cool points".

I strongly suspect this was not a sell-out. I suspect it was more a move to save a good deal of money. Mapbox is very expensive at DDG-scale, and given how lean and efficient they like to run things, I can easily understand this choice. The fact that Apple also cares (loudly) about privacy makes it even easier.

(I don't work for Apple and I run a competitor to Mapbox.)

They could have rolled out their own (privacy-focused) map service. The data is open, the stack is open as well.

And how much do the database server(s) cost, not to mention pushing map tiles out in terms of data costs. DDG isn't exactly flush with cash like google and apple are.

Not much at all. In fact, since the tiles are only generated once, they could stick a CDN in front and never have to worry about anything but data transfer costs afterwards.

That CDN isn't free all the content and traffic overhead has costs, CDN charges you for each request, and every byte sent. On a small (under a million users a day) application it may not be that much... but even ten of millions of users a day, it costs a LOT

Hell, why do you think google invested so much time into image compression tech to save a few bytes here and there.

I doubt it’s much, the whole OSM infrastructure used to be handled as a favour by one of the London universities. I doubt DDG Maps is operating at significantly higher scale, especially once you take into account they just have to serve static data.

OSM data is constantly changing, being improved and expanded.

More or less as paying some service provider to do that for you, but they could have marketed it positively, as Qwant has done just last month (see https://www.qwant.com/maps/ which incidentally is open source as well)

If you're looking for privacy protection, Qwant's partnership with Huawei doesn't sound great https://e.huawei.com/us/publications/global/ict_insights/hw_...

Do you think Apple sells their maps below cost, or that Apple is able (due to its scale?) to get significantly better deals than DDG could get?

Definitely a severe regression in the Netherlands. Apple Maps doesn't even show houses, and has only a fraction of the POI's OpenStreetMap has. It doesn't have directions for bicycles either — and it leaves out a bunch of dedicated cycleways in my area.

And the colours! All features seem to bleed into their low-contrast pastel neighbours.

This doesn't feel like a proper match for DuckDuckGo at all.

Someone mentioned Qwant Maps upthread, I think that’s what I’ll use instead.

Qwant Maps is OpenStreetMap data with custom styling that makes it look more like Google/Apple/Bing Maps.

It's very pastellish.

One of my reasons for not use DDG was maps, another big one is instant airline data on search query results (which isn't fair bc Google owns ITA). This upgrade to maps is awesome, IMO Mapbox felt like I was in the stone ages for map functionality and UI.

>I wish they were explaining why they moved away from Mapbox and OSM in general!

Because it sucks. Isn’t that obvious? There’s no point in having a feature that nobody uses. I switched to DDG a few months ago and this has always been the one weakness. This is really good news IMO. Apple maps has come a long long way since launch, and their data is about on par with Google at this point.

You can argue all day that of course it’s still a commercial company. But I’d rather compromise and hitch my wagon to the folks that are outwardly explicitly drawing out their commitment to privacy, whose incentives I understand and trust.

In many places (e.g. many parts of Germany) Google and Apple maps are far inferior compared to OSM and Mapbox specifically.

I tried finding an address recently on Google Maps, and just couldn’t find it, only to discover that that street was added 4 years ago, so ofc Google (with data from 2011) didn’t have it. OSM had it.

Yes, OSM can give truly excellent results for certain areas. And truly awful results for others.

The same for Apple Maps, except any improvements that go there fall into another closed silo.

This applies to all of the mapping providers. It takes a truly massive ground game to get really good map data for the entire world. Many players are working on this and I'm sure many will continue to work on it. A map that was garbage for your area three months ago might be great today.

I’m also happy to see this move, but I tried to give Apple Maps another chance recently and it’s significantly behind Google. I didn’t even last a day. Especially if you’re trying to find things around your area, which is probably 99% of my usage.

No surprise the blog post highlights how easy to use this integration is...in Cupertino.

ive been using it for a few months now. its not as good as google maps but definitely doesn't suck. and certainly is better than apple maps.

>ive been using it for a few months now. its not as good as google maps but definitely doesn't suck. and certainly is better than apple maps.

I've also found the mapping aspects to be ok, but the search results are truly abysmal in comparison to Apple Maps. Point-to-point direction finding is of course a solved, commoditized technical problem this point. But the real special sauce is in combining that with real time traffic info and highly relevant local search results, which Apple does far better than any open source offering I've seen.

> Apple maps has come a long long way since launch, and their data is about on par with Google at this point.

Not in Portugal, or most places in Europe where I’ve tried it. They are so far behind it’s not even funny.

Or most of east Asia. It won’t even find what you’re looking for most of the time, let alone give sensible directions.

You're forgetting one detail that I think should be emphasized here: OSM is about free knowledge (as in freedom). You can use, modify and share OSM data however you want. Apple on the other hand is hoarding its information. You can only access it through their products in the ways they intended. They control everything (as always).

I do believe it when Apple says they're respecting their users' privacy, just like I believe it when DDG says that. But I am disappointed when I see how these companies neglect freedom and how so few of their users care about it.

> You can use, modify and share OSM data however you want.

You are still free to do that with OSM. Not sure what that has to do with DDG. Just because they don't want to use OSM, doesn't change any of your rights to using OSM.

> Apple on the other hand is hoarding its information.

You are free to requisition a fleet of mapping vehicles, drones and satellites and gather your own maps information and share it with whomever you want. If Apple is the one paying a ton of money to create their information, I'm not sure why it's surprising that they want to use that information in their products.

You don't have a right to Apple's mapping data any more than you have a right to Colonel Sanders's chicken recipe -- however, nothing is stopping you from making your own chicken recipe and sharing it with whomever you want. You could even start a community around sharing chicken recipes. That some people don't care about chicken recipe secrecy doesn't harm your rights to enjoy chicken with recipes created and shared by you or your friends. Some of us actually just want to buy some fried chicken and not worry about the provenance of the recipe. We have more important priorities (for us) than the openness of a private company's chicken preparation secrets. We just want good tasting chicken. Many of us aren't chicken enthusiasts, spending our time lamenting the secrecy of the Colonel's chicken choices.

What it really sounds like the source of your complaint is that if DDG doesn't continue to use OSM, then perhaps OSM will suffer for it. If that's the real origin of your disdain for this decision, then perhaps OSM isn't as valuable in the marketplace of ideas as people might think it is. However, if this actually doesn't affect OSM (I don't think it does,) then that means that DDG can use whatever they want and the OSM folks can happily share to their heart's content.

Apple has more than enough money. More than they'll ever need. It's actively employing strategies to avoid taxes. I think they can afford to do some public service from time to time, even if it means (in absolute numbers, massive) losses (if you don't count the value of having done something good for the people).

I'm not saying Apple does nothing for the open source scene. In fact, they're maintaining some important projects (like WebKit). But when you have billions of dollars that you don't know what to do with stored in some offshore haven, you could do a bit more.

Apple do support OSM. In one European country, Apple Maps actually uses OSM data solely.

Yeah and that's nice but I think they could do better (than developing their own proprietary maps)

It’s disappointing that DDG isn’t supporting an open infrastructure, but when you think about it their offering is in fact a closed infrastructure similar in principle to Apple’s. It is a closed product, but which promises to protect your privacy. That has value when choosing to use a service in the short term, but it’s not something to build on or to rely on in the long term, after all both companies could make any pivot they want if their incentives change in future. A better model would be contributing to a search engine which is open source, that cannot pivot without being forked.

Agreed, even though it's extremely unlikely companies like Apple or DuckDuckGo will pivot.

Another big argument for supporting free software solutions is to do it for the people who want/need freedom (like whistleblowers or activists).

> Apple maps has come a long long way since launch, and their data is about on par with Google at this point.

Reporting from Washington, DC: nope.

Well, the map quality depends on the region. So I could easily argue that OSM has much better quality than Google Maps, looking at Hamburg, Germany for example.

I know that the quality is not everywhere as good as there, but the quality varies for the other Map products too. So if it 'sucks' or the other thing 'sucks' greatly depends on where you currently are.

> Apple maps has come a long long way since launch, and their data is about on par with Google at this point.

In California maybe.

Everywhere else? Not even close.

In my experience, Apple maps are on a par with Google Maps in London. Google never get my address location right, despite numerous reports to them. Apple does.

i'm in north Texas and into Oklahoma a lot, and Apple Maps has been fantastic here. I haven't had Google Maps installed on my iPhone in years.

Living in Germany, I've found that OSM embeds in websites are more common for me now while browsing, and to be blunt: they're ugly.

The maps themselves are just difficult to visually parse, and unpleasant to look at compared to Google Maps and Apple Maps (which look comparably attractive at a glance). I dunno if that's solvable using a third party OSM service provider or not, but to me it seems like a good enough reason to switch.

Exactly. Reaching a critical mass of users is also about UI/UX and it's a bummer they seem to ignore that.

As someone used to osm, you can show me my home town on Google maps and I won't recognize it anymore. There is so little detail on the map, it might as well be blank. Osm is fine, it's you who has only trained yourself in using Google maps.

No, OSM simply has bad UX.

Your anecdote is completely irrelevant, I'm not sure why you bothered to bring it up, since you're talking about data, while I'm talking about design.

If it was just me being too used to Google Maps, why don't I feel the same way about Apple Maps?

> No, OSM simply has bad UX.

It's not very convincing if I just argued the opposite and you don't bother giving a single counter argument. What's more is that it makes me feel there is no point talking about it if logical arguments don't convince you for no apparent reason.

> Your anecdote is completely irrelevant, I'm not sure why you bothered to bring it up, since you're talking about data, while I'm talking about design.

I am talking about design. If you zoom in on Google maps, the data is mostly there (osm also has more data, sure, but that's not universally true on the planet (though on average, per square kilometer, osm easily beats Google, but that's a blog post I'm saving for another day)). Google just hides all the data except a few random roads and random shops or something. You literally have to zoom in until your screen covers the area of two buildings before it shows you what's in the building. Somehow I'm supposed to have an overview of a city from the sparsely populated view. OSM (though you can have any style you like, I'm going for what I see most frequently) just dumps all the data it had on your screen at almost any zoom level (below province sized zoom) and you can see details like building outlines and shop icons from quite far up.

> If it was just me being too used to Google Maps, why don't I feel the same way about Apple Maps?

Maybe Apple maps is very similar to Google maps? If that holds, I should not be able to use apple maps (just like I can't use Google maps very well), but last time I tried to open it in a browser it told me to buy an apple device first so I can't compare. I don't know the answer to your question.

> I dunno if that's solvable using a third party OSM service provider or not,

Approximately everyone is using a third-party OSM service, since the OSM project does not provide map tiles for general use.

I also strongly disagree on your other criticism of the most common style, but that's a matter of taste. To me, they look more like a proper city map is supposed to look, and provide more detail that's useful for me to orient myself. If I were typically doing long car drives, I might prefer Google, but I don't.

Probably because OSM didn't fulfill the promise it was created with?

Implementation of OSM stuff is horrible and usability as well. I LOVE free software and my privacy is very important to me - so I switched everything to self-hosted and encrypted solutions. Except maps. I still use google maps for a lot of navigating just because other solutions are really inconvenient to work with.

When DuckDuckGo is set to a dark theme, the map is also in dark mode! To me, that is an incredible valuable feature.

Edit: which is a fallback to Mapbox, no Apple Maps feature.

It seems they're falling back to Mapbox when a dark theme is used, presumably because MapKit JS doesn't support any theming or styling of maps.

Good catch, I missed that. However, I guess that Apple will provide a dark mode for their map, too, at some point since they build dark mode into their OS(es?) anyway.

I'm sure this will come once @media(prefers-color-scheme) becomes more prevalent.

Won't take much time, since Safari betas already have it.

Maps on macOS already supports dark mode so it’s likely just a matter of time.

We can send people to the moon but we can barely get dark mode right :)

We can't currently send people to the moon, unfortunately. SpaceX is working on creating that capability in the next decade or so though and with there track record it might even happen.

Yeah the last person we sent to the moon was in 1972, so long ago that Eugene Cernan has since died at 82 years old.

Is there an updated version of this xkcd somewhere? https://xkcd.com/893/

No, but there are four left, so we're tracking just above the 5th percentile line.

I think I remember hearing something about the Apollo astronauts having higher-than-average rates of cardiovascular disease as a result of the increased radiation in space.

The sample size is definitely not large enough to make such a broad generalization.

I would imagine that there are more medical details than this to the story.

I think "Darker Reader" extension got it right finally...

You'll get dark mode everywhere, automatically, with good looking dark colors.

I think it does that by leveraging color theory and CSS filters.

If anyone wants this for Google Maps, try the Dark Reader extension for Chrome.

Here is how it looks on my machine: https://i.imgur.com/rpCiJSA.jpg

Not bad, not bad. The colored areas, especially that green would annoy me, though.

That's interesting because Apple Maps supports dark mode on the Mac[1].

[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/9km62p/apple_maps_tran...

It's also supported in MapKitJS as of the latest version (5.13.0)[1]

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/mapkitjs/mapkit_js...

Check out "Darker Reader" extension... now you'll get that everywhere, automatically, with good looking dark colors.

I think it achieves that by leveraging color theory and CSS filters.

Once you try it you cannot go back :)

I am not involved in development nor devs are friends of mine, I just think it didn't get all the exposure it deserves.

PS if you're on chrome, after installing Darker Reader the infamous chrome white flash problem will mess with your eyes... Following thread has a partial solution to that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18714902

as much as I love that extension, I prefer "native" dark modes (as in, provided directly by the website)

well, to that I prefer the capability of having a dark mode for every website, especially when the result looks good is beautifully readable.

I have to say I'm pretty upset about this.

Not over privacy stuff (I don't trust Apple that much either), but because Apple maps just sucks. Unless things changed within the last 4 months, Apple Maps couldn't accurately navigate me from Custer State Park to Mt. Rushmore (which really isn't far).

Have you previously used OpenStreetMap? I'd be interested in hearing from those who have. I can say as a DDG user that presentation-wise I disliked what DDG was using before -- but from a direction-accuracy perspective I simply have no idea and would love to hear from others.

I'll be fair in that I've never used it for navigation. But I have used it for looking up locations of places, and it never seemed bad. But I don't do that very often.

It's either great or useless, 100% dependent on your location.

Maybe 40% of my city is missing (top-20 in the US) including absolutely everything in my neighborhood other than a couple parks and churches. It gets my address to the correct block (between X and Y Aves) but that's it. Some small towns around me barely exist, others are absolutely complete.

You'll probably do ok in SF/NYC/LA/Chicago etc, but it gets really spotty beyond that.

Link the area, someone will add something if it comes to this thread :)

OSM is really awesome in (western) Europe. I use it all the time. All new bike trails are in it. Even the trees in down town are in it. It is even great for car navigation. I used the map data to navigate in tiny beach villages in Spain, for a round trip in Iceland and on several other occasions in western Europe. However, i only relied on the data and let my Garmin device create the routes.

I think OSM is a more natural, and even higher quality, match for DDG. I'm pretty surprised by this. Sure, Apple is pretty privacy concious too. At least they want their users to have that image of them. But OSM is on a whole different level due to their open nature rather than a black box with an API in front.

OSM is becoming pretty impressive too. Even smaller towns here in Sweden are decently mapped. A huge difference compared to just five years ago¹, far greater difference than since Apple Maps was launched as far as I can tell. Apple Maps launched in a better state, yes, but not in a good state, and I think it's been moving slowly since then. OSM launched in a minimal state but are moving forward like a maglev train.

¹ Also visualized here: https://labs.mapbox.com/ten-years-openstreetmap/

Competition is good.

I am happily using Firefox, DuckDuckGo, and Apple Maps instead of their Google equivalents—even though I was perfectly happy with them for the most part—just to do what little I can to ensure continued competition in these spaces.

Yeah, Apple Maps isn’t as good as Google Maps in many regards. But it’s been improving, and it’s honestly not that much worse for the overwhelming majority of my use cases, to the point where I don’t even notice except a handful of times per year. And I can always fall back to the Google product if I absolutely have to.

I have found that I unfortunately have to frequently fall back to Google Maps. Which I don't actually like. Honestly it is more a disappointment in Apple. I would expect them to be able to get directions right for a well traveled path. Those two parks have a lot of visitors each year and frequently people will visit both in the same day. But Apple Maps wanted me to go a completely different way and I couldn't figure out how it was connecting.

Maybe things changed, but that wasn't that long ago. And we all know that once a product falls (and pretty hard), it is harder to recover.

Apple Maps sucks but DDG is also terrible (in languages other then En) and both make dubious claims about protecting customer privacy. So this is match made in heaven.

I have given up on Apple Maps long time ago and I have given up on DDG after many failed attempts.

I am using Qwant https://lite.qwant.com/ which is surprisingly good for general search terms and embarrassing for specialized search terms (like programming and such).

Interesting that Qwant says "the only search engine that respects your privacy" without giving any backing to that claim. I had to nav out of the "lite" URL, then navigate to "Philosophy" to see why their claim had any merit.

According to Wikipedia, they still pipe your searches through Bing except for FR/DE (though anonymized), and it's not who the backend search engine is there.

>According to Wikipedia, they still pipe your searches through Bing

So does DDG.

The games link in the footer of Qwant is a bit odd. Doesn't really belong with the other links.

If any of you are looking for a company (that is not Apple) that provides map tiles while respecting your customer's privacy, my company (link in profile) does not keep logs beyond debugging necessity and has plans to further improve our privacy profile. We also can make provision for proxy servers in the interest of privacy, if that is helpful for your use case.

(We currently use Analytics on our homepage, but have plans to replace that on our next iteration.)

Replace it with what if I may ask?

Hey spurgu, that's yet to be decided. :)

We're investigating some of the self-hosted options or our own log-based metrics (think ElasticSearch + Kibana). We're trying to avoid third-parties, if at all possible.

What would your analytics stack store if you plan to keep no logs other than those that are necessary for debugging?

The analytics I'm referring to would be for our marketing page (and only our marketing page). The logs are for our services themselves.

It may seem like splitting hairs, but I believe it's entirely reasonable to collect useful data on the marketing site vs collecting data via the services our customers pay for (and are used primarily by those who are not our direct customers).

There's also a difference between aggregated data (e.g., number of page hits / avg time spent on page) and PII (e.g., IP addresses, browser fingerprinting).

So DDG will now use Apple’s data to find places? Please don’t. It should be the other way around.

Not even a month ago I made a search for a famous place in Lisbon (you know, big metropolitan area, capital of Portugal, 11th-most populous urban area in the European Union) and Apple Maps didn’t even know it existed. Made the search in DDG and it found it, from where I had to copy the address and manually search for it in Maps.

Or I could’ve used Google Maps in one try, but I genuinely want DDG and Apple Maps to succeed so I keep trying. But please do use the best data of both, don’t replace one with the other.

>best data of both

Isn't that basically just Google Maps? I thought Apple Maps' data was just a subset of Google Maps'.

What does Apple Maps do better? Genuinely curious.

It is, but without the desire to monetize your searches.

Yes, Google Maps is superior in my region, but as I mentioned, I’d rather support Apple and DDG. I do so for their stances on privacy, but also because usability-wise I do prefer Apple Maps.

> I thought Apple Maps' data was just a subset of Google Maps'

They must be different datasets; I doubt Google would want to give Apple any data, or data Apple would take it. I will mention that once I have found one place in Apple Maps that was not in Google Maps. It was a small hostel in Europe.

> I thought Apple Maps' data was just a subset of Google Maps

That hasn't ever been true with Apple Maps (to my knowledge, but absolutely not true now.)

Here's a bit on Apple Maps's current situation:

https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/apple-is-rebuilding-maps-f...

Turn by turn notifications for walking directions. Surprisingly nice in combination with the watch. It just thumps my wrist when I'm supposed to turn.

That being said, I still search for places in google maps, and just plug the address into apple maps.

Is there a reason for keeping the specific place secret?

It's a shame to see that DuckDuckGo and many other such companies (yes, also Apple) jump on every "privacy" marketing opportunity they get but largely ignore related user rights such as freedom of information and free software.

Actions like this, the fact that DDGs core components are still proprietary and the freezing of DuckDuckHack just kinda make me think DDG sometimes cares more about the PR than its users.

Don't get me wrong I do think DDG does a good job at providing a good search engine service that respects its users' privacy. It just bothers me that (almost) no one around here seems to care about freedom.

It's a similar thing with Apple, with the exception that Apple actively goes against even the most basic freedoms by forbidding sideloading (if that's still happening), forbidding the GPL on the App Store and being in control of the whole stack - from hardware to software - on almost every platform they have, amongst others.

I'm not saying you need to love freedom but it's a good thing to have, so why not propagate it alongside with privacy? And if you don't do it for yourself, do it for those who care about their freedom.

How is free software a right? I'm not dismissing the value of free software, but considering it a right? If free software is a right, that diminishes the what "right" actually means. Freedom of speech is a right. The ability to defend oneself is a right. Privacy is a right. But free software? How does the map provider of DDG have any effect on a person's ability to use, create, or distribute free software?

I believe it is a user's right to know and verify what a specific piece of software does to his data and machine and adjust that behaviour if needed. For that, they need access to the source code.

I believe it is a user's right to share the software and configuration they use to help out their neighbour and for that they need to be able to share copies of the software.

Lastly, I obviously believe it is a user's right to run the software wherever they want.

So yeah, free software is a right in my opinion, like freedom of information and free speech. Unfortunately, not many companies care about it (yet).

You're also right in the point that DDG not setting OSM as the default map provider won't actually hurt OSM, really. But it does piss me off a bit when a company always talks about how "privacy friendly" and "open source" they are yet they completely dismiss the (related) freedom aspect. Because "privacy" and "open source" are just the buzzwords the media is talking about.

Does DDG not know about freedom? Does DDG not care about freedom? Why? I know they probably have a good reason for that and good intent in what they're doing but without having an answer to these questions, it just looks like they're grabbing the low hanging fruit sometimes.

I struggle with this too. I applaud Apple's emphasis on privacy but they've probably done more than any single company to advance the spread of proprietary software. If they had it their way then their app store would be the single gatekeeper for all non-trivial consumer apps. I have plenty of issues with Google but I can still sideload an APK on my phone if I want and I see Google doing a lot more to help the web compete with native apps than Apple does. I don't want to live in a world where a arbitrary app store rejection means my app effectively doesn't exist.

I’m a bit concerned about how much data Google has on me and I do think Apple is genuinely more concerned about user privacy. But what’s the difference in practical terms really?

Google uses my data to target ads at me but doesn’t actually give any of my data to its ad-buying customers. Apple doesn’t do this but is obliged to turn over my iCloud data to the government with a subpoena.

Since this is really the scenario we should be most concerned about and since all tech companies are required to comply with the law it seems to me that the only way to have any meaningful online privacy is to not use cloud services from any vendor.

Seems to me like one of the key differences is in how much data is actually collected. DDG claims in their blog post that they send no PII to apple, they're just using apple to provide a map view and search data.

I'm not even sure this level of anonymized usage is possible with google's APIs.

Edit: I just had the experience of trying to use biking directions in google maps the other day. In order to enable actual turn-by-turn directions I had to turn on something called "Web and App activity" which, as best as I can tell, is an unbelievably invasive set of technologies designed to track you across websites, real locations, and non-google owned apps using google APIs.

There's a real and meaningful difference in the amount and depth of the data collected by google vs. its competitors. I think a huge motivating factor for why google collects that data is their ad-driven revenue model.

To tie it back to your original question: Sure we could all just not use cloud services but in the mean time there are clear differences in how vulnerable you are to privacy violations by nation-states through legal means based on how much data various cloud services are actively trying to collect on you.

Yeah I agree this is very shady. Until recently you couldn't use Google Assistant at all without enabling that, which means that every time you launch an app it's logged on their servers. They've fixed this recently but they still require you to turn it on for a lot of features in Android.

> Google uses my data to target ads at me but doesn’t actually give any of my data to its ad-buying customers. Apple doesn’t do this but is obliged to turn over my iCloud data to the government with a subpoena.

I agree with you, but Google is way more aggressive in its data collection behavior than apple and i am getting sick of that.

I have been using Google maps this past month and i noticed some dark patterns :

- after getting directions from `your current location` when you deactivate your location services and switch apps, google maps will delete the directions and resets to the page that asks you to chose a `from` location, now you have to give google your current location to get those directions back.

- you cannot get your `current location` without internet enabled, even when you have `location services` enabled.

I'm seriously considering going iPhone for the first time, I've been an Android user since I could get my hands on an Android phone on Sprint for the first time (2009? I think...) and lived through the crappiness of early Android. I prefer Android cause I can root it, but I never do, feel like it will break something I want if I use a "ROM" (why they're not called DISTROS is beyond me) but also last time I tried to install a ROM I screwed up my phone so bad I had to factory reset the hard way through a tutorial, I basically bricked it.

With iOS I only get iOS or jailbroken iOS. Not really satisfying, but Google made an open source kernel into a proprietary mess of literal spyware.

You know, I switched to an iPhone exactly for this purpose years back. Got an iPhone 6s and used it for years.

It was definitely not easy giving up the convenience of integrations you got with Google, the small things. In the end apple maps suck compared to Google and if you want to look for a restaurant well would you rather give your info to Yelp/foursquare than Google? So Google maps it is.

After a bit you get used to it, apple does scratch your privacy itch by showing things like when an app is using your location.

Then after three years I had to upgrade, I was like that was grest, but fuck me if I have to shell out 10 Benjamins for a fucking phone when I can get an as good phone (everything except privacy) for half that price. I just purchased a Galaxy S9 and finally remembered how much I used to like Android.

Moral of the story is, if you're anything like me, you'll eventually be like fuck it Google take my data give me a cheap good phone.

>but fuck me if I have to shell out 10 Benjamins for a fucking phone

You don't have to. iPhone 8 and even 7 works well even today and unlike most Android OEMs including Google, you will get updates for at least 4 years easily. You been a 6s user, you already know that.

> but is obliged to turn over my iCloud data to the government with a subpoena.

Are you suggesting Google doesn’t also have to do this?

No my point is that all cloud providers have to do this so there's not as much difference in effective privacy between them as discussions often seem to assume.

Seems like you need to store all your data locally or encrypted on your own servers if you really want privacy.

> Apple ... is obliged to turn over my iCloud data to the government with a subpoena.

Apple must of course comply with a subpoena, but it can only hand over data it holds the keys to. The iOS Security whitepaper[1] goes into some details. Any encryption keys that are stored in iCloud Keychain "share[] the security characteristics of iCloud Keychain—the keys are available only on the user’s trusted devices, and not to Apple or any third party." This is used for some, but not all, categories of iCloud data today—iMessage transcripts, for instance, are safe only if you do not use iCloud Backup.

1: https://www.apple.com/business/site/docs/iOS_Security_Guide....

Your post makes it sound like Google targeting ads to you and Apple complying with legal data requests happen with the same frequency, which is obviously false, and definitely is a difference in practical terms for the everyday user.

According to Apple's transparency report[2], they gave data up in 2,088 account requests in the United States in the first half of 2018.

2: https://www.apple.com/privacy/government-information-request...

I agree there are some important differences but for my own privacy I’m much less concerned about being targeted by ads then I am about some future administration deciding I’m a person of interest for some reason and subpoenaing my entire online life. In that respect there doesn’t seem to be a huge difference between the two.

I deleted my Facebook account because Facebook actually has sold user data to third parties.

Not in the US - so realize that not everyone experiences this - but I've never had a mapping software be so terrible as Apple maps, led me completely out of the way and over a toll bridge that I didn't need to go over. Trip was over an hour longer than it needed to be. I'll definitely still be using !maps to get google maps on duckduckgo.

!gm is shorter for Google Maps on duckduckgo (in case you didn't know about this shortcut)

Is this recent? I'm in the US, and have found that Apple Maps have improved greatly since it was released. The directions and estimates are equal or better than Google Maps for my area now.

For Scotland, the maps are pretty good (much better than Google Maps here). I was quite surprised.

I live in Europe and only use Apple Maps. It is good enough. Sometimes POI are missing, that’s when I use Google Maps (Browser only)

It's such an inconsistent experience for me, in my home region, Transylvania, Google Maps is vastly superior even tho I'd prefer Apple. But I found that -- weirdly enough -- at least while vacationing in the UK, Google seems to show a lot less information on the map on the same zoom level, to a point where I need to zoom in to a level where I feel I can't see a large enough area at once. An example of this is the Brighton Marina, trying to look up the POIs there is frustrating on Google Maps while at the same time it's usable on Apple's offering.

It's regional.

For a long time (in internet time), Apple Maps were clearly inferior to Google Maps.

These days, it's more nuanced. In some geographies they have parity. In a select few, Apple is ahead. For most, though, Google is better.

For speed and privacy reasons, I check Apple Maps first. If I don't find what I'm looking for, then I go to Google Maps and follow up by force-quitting Google Maps when I'm done.

Alternative: in countries where Apple maps suck, try Here maps: great UI and offline maps.

where do you think apple maps is better than google?

google maps is the only google service i still use on a regular basis because it's clearly better than apple maps for me (california mostly). apple maps is ok for simple use cases like finding a known business, but an ambiguous search on google maps is almost always better, as is their routing.

i'd love to find a better mapping service for these more complicated use cases so i can avoid google altogether.

Interestingly, I find Apple Maps to be at least par, and in some cases better, in California. This is following the push they had this summer to improve their maps here.

Usually it's now better in the Bay Area.

In NorCal, Apple is better in many regards than Google Maps. Better time estimates, better forestry and building designation.

In the SF Bay area, they are generally on par depending on what features or points of interest you want to find. Some locales are shockingly different. Shenzhen China is much much better on Apple (Google and Bing show roads in the river - completely misaligned) but Shanghai is almost useless on Apple, but very detailed on Google (assuming you can even get to Google in China).

For me the killer feature that makes me choose Apple Maps is “turn-by-turn” directions for Transit, including the information which exit is the best one to get to my destination.

Here in NZ I have used Apple maps as my first port of call for a few years. It’s improved a lot. On the rare occasions I’ve been led astray I’ve submitted reports and all have been followed up with fairly quickly. Driving time estimation also seem to be conservative to the point I usually arrive 5mims early which is a good thing in my opinion. I also find Apple directions does a good job of avoiding awkward turns and working out a good overall route. I also receive good and timely traffic and road closure notifications mid trip which allows me to easily reroute my journey even while en route. Another advantage is good public transit directions particually during my holiday in Europe last year. Apple is generally good enough that I don’t even have the Google Maps app anymore.

What‘s your country? Using Apple Maps all the time in Germany and found it to be actually better than Google Maps (though with a tendency to reroute around traffic more often than Google Maps used to do).

Is Apple Maps good with public transit? I used Google maps in and around Stuttgart and Munich. It worked extremely well. Google Maps was extremely good with public transport in NYC but Apple Maps was not.

Where I live but the Southern US Apple Maps is almost as good as Google Maps. Public Transport isn’t quite as good with Apple maps in my city.

I've found Apple Maps to usually be terrific with public transit -- with the caveat that they don't have transit data for nearly as many cities as Google does. For a while I considered Apple to be slightly ahead of Google, as Apple's system could tell you which exit from transit stations to take when you were walking/transferring, although I believe Google's caught up with that since.

Crap for Munich at least. Just tried it, couldn‘t even find the route between home and work - and both are along major public transport routes. However, I typically use the DB Navigator app for these purposes in Germany. Highly recommended.

It's pretty regional. It's less confused about Dublin's public transport system these days than Google is, say, so I've started to use it more.

One thing is apple maps hasn't added bike maps for some reason. This is a seriously hindrance in Europe I expect. I'm in Montreal and this keeps me from using apple maps, as I like to assess walking/biking/transit/uber to decide how to get somewhere

I could see a future where DDG gets acquired by Apple.

Separate discussion from last week, most argue against it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18816748

I'd argue for it. Apple is missing a search engine, has deep-enough pockets and resources to build its own engine if DDG API contracts were stopped, and is favored by people who value their privacy.

Apple is missing a search engine. That doesn't imply that Apple needs a search engine, nor does it imply that acquiring one would be the most profitable thing they could be doing with their available resources.

Arguably, a key part of Apple's success is that they don't behave like Microsoft.

Would DDG improve apples AI work? Google seems to be ahead of Apple with smart assistants, maybe that only a result of bad privacy policies on Googles part.

With Apple pushing privacy as a major feature of iOS compared to alternatives, if the company continues taking a consumer focused, privacy respecting approach acquiring DDG could help strengthen branding, and maybe bring together an integrated privacy solution competing with Google’s integrated ad solution.

DDG doesn't even -really- have a search engine, they are using Bing's API. So the acquisition wouldn't even make sense.

Wait, really? I thought DuckDuckGo merely implemented APIs ("bangs") to fallback search engine providers in case a user preferred it.

Surely DuckDuckGo has implemented their own search engine, crawler and indexer apart from other providers?

> Surely DuckDuckGo has implemented their own search engine, crawler and indexer apart from other providers?

No. They have their own crawler but it's only used for Instant Answers and other widget stuff.

https://duck.co/help/results/sources

> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.

So in other words, all organic search results come from Bing and Oath.

But then what's the point?

EDIT: This is an honest question, not snark. I'd appreciate an honest answer instead of a blind drive-by downvote. I don't learn anything about why a thin UI layer over a bunch of search engines I can access directly is useful for privacy if you just downvote my comment.

Because you're not accessing the search engines directly, you're going through a sort of proxy that hides your identity.

I have to agree I’m dissapointed by this. I thought there was at least one party with an independent web search engine.

DDG uses Bing as well as a bunch of other sources, including their own crawlers. Portraying it as a sort of "Bing in disguise" is incorrect.

Their own crawler is not used for organic search results. See sibling comment.

Duckduckgo is not a search engine. It's an UI layer for search APIs provided by other players like Bing and Yandex.

+1 - acquisition by a FAANG would be a instant turn-off for someone like me. I value its independence.

Not to mention it would probably be a literal turn-off. Apple would redesign it to require their OS and HW in order to search with, to correspond with Apple lock-in philosophies. Your ability to use it would be turned off.

Probably not, but they just aren't good at services, so I'm sure they would botch it in short order.

I'd rather see an investment. Maybe by providing a really good deal on maps[0]. Seems like this is a win-win for both. Apple wants to focus more on services and DDG gets a bit[1] of validation by being able to provide Apple maps.

[0] Obviously I have no idea if this is the case.

[1] As if they needed any.

I'm a privacy nut but their search engine is unusable, i feel like for every 3rd search i need to switch back to Google to get proper results, Bing is a lot better for programming/computer answers.

Can you give an example of a search that works in Google, but not in DDG? It must be a couple of months since I last searched with Google.

"pizza in berlin" lacks several options, and I just checked my neighbourhood. This is why I'm still using google maps on my iphone, their search results are far better and more accurate

The results themselves are powered by Yelp (and have been before the map switch). The only difference is that now their location is displayed on Apple Maps, not Mapbox.

"pizza in frankfurt am main" is terrible.

Scrolling with shift (!?) doesn't work at all in my FF.

I can't change the search term on the map page...

The satellite view doesn't have street names (????!)

Edit: the link I click is a yelp.com link. Why are we even talking about Apples privacy here and not yelps?

What a horrible step back...

> The satellite view doesn't have street name

Are you sure you're not in hybrid view?

To zoom in using my mouse wheel, I have to hold down shift, and then it zooms in the opposite direction to how it works in Google Maps (Firefox 64.0 on Ubuntu).

The behaviour works fine for the MapBox maps.

Same experience with the zooming. Thanks for the tip on holding shift, but it's realllly slow too.

I also can't drag the map around or click on any items on the map. Really inferior experience so far.

Did you find a way to switch back to the Mapbox maps?

I can't imagine many people use the maps features in DDG. Switching over to Apple maps isn't going to help, considering that everyone I know in New England stops using Apple maps after about the fifth attempt. Absolutely everyone has an iPhone yet I have no idea how Apple Maps looks like at this point.

Scroll wheel isn't zooming the map for me.

At least in Safari, pinch-to-zoom does work.

But it does support other/better trackpad gestures like pinch to zoom and twist to rotate the map.

Not for me it doesn't - pinch zooms the entire page, not the map. Mouse wheel does nothing. Rotate does nothing.

Total usability fail here. Very disappointed in DDG :(

Apple map sucks on non-MacOS... no idea why DDG chose them unless its prep for acquisition. you can use CTRL+MouseWheel to zoom in/out.

Zoom doesn't work on Sierra w/ Safari for me in any way - only tapping the +/- buttons works.

Yep, very annoying, especially for people who use trackpoints.

Hold down shift while scrolling to zoom, just like Maps.app.

Do you know how to move the map? Click and drag doesn't do anything.

That doesn't do anything on my end (using Firefox on a Mac). And for me Maps.app doesn't require any modifier keys to zoom with the scroll wheel

this works...very slowly and the scroll direction is backwards from typical (scroll up to zoom in is what I'm used to)

> just like Maps.app.

What is a maps.app?

The macOS Maps app.

The map no longer loads for me at all (Chrome on Linux). Maybe they're getting overloaded?

I guess DDG are angling for Apple to purchase them. Personally I would have preferred for them to stick with OSM. Also, after a quick test, the Apple maps load slowly and driving directions are offloaded to another provider (Bing, Here, Google. or OSM)

I really wish DDG would build a Google Apps competitor ... as long as gmail dominates email and business email the privacy argument is largely irrelevant because people will spend hours per day logged in and locked in to the Google ecosystem

I think the main motivation for a search company to go and build an email service (or an entire Google Apps competitor) would be the same reason Google did it... to mine user data. So to that end I don't think it really makes sense for DDG to do such a thing.

I think they did it because existing alternatives were terrible

I don’t use Gmail. FastMail works nicely for me, with no google-login required.

Don’t see why DDG (a search engine) should run an email-service, nor vica-verse really.

If you want to control all the world's data...

I could see Proton* making this play.

How would that work? Surely they'd need to index your documents and emails so you could search over them. And I think many DDG users would find that pretty unappealing.

There's no need for that, and no reason a search engine company should provide those things.

There are already alternatives for every Google product, most of them objectively better.

The only thing keeping you locked into Google is you.

> I really wish DDG would build a Google Apps competitor

That sounds like it violates the nature in which DDG wishes to brand itself. It seems DDG does not want to be the next centralized data platform (this kills their brand of privacy). The one product they already provide - search - is often times not better than Google results. They rather let you choose which search provider you want to use with their bangs system.

> as long as gmail dominates email and business email the privacy argument is largely irrelevant

I know Gsuite exists, but I have personally seen more instances of Office 365 than Gsuite for business in the wild. Not that Microsoft is any more privacy-friendly... just saying that I don't believe Google dominates business email.

My workplace uses Google's stuff, unfortunately. However that's only for work stuff. I don't use any Google services for my own purposes.

If DDG implemented their own set of apps, I wouldn't object -- but it wouldn't be anything that I'd actually use, either.

For a while, DDG offered a free Jabber provider which lots of people hoped would do to XMPP what Gmail did to Email but they shut it down.

Personally - I find Apple maps (now, not at all in the early days) much better than Google maps - except for one thing: On several occasions where I enter a street address and if it's in a heavily populated area particularly if it's on an intersection the pointer will be in the wrong place on the street - I've reported these when I've encountered them and Apple has fixed each one within 24-48 hours but it's still a bit annoying when it does happen. My guessing is that because Google farms a tremendous amount of public and private data from Android devices and Google searches / services they are able to use their privately held wealth of peoples information to improve street numbering especially when new roads are added or intersections have been changed - that combined with Google maps being 14 years old and Apple maps only being 7. Still, a sensible move for a privacy focused system I believe.

One thing Google Maps does have that I don't think Apple Maps has is crowd sourced edits. You can actually propose edits to Google Maps as a user. It's especially prominent with business information, but it is even possible to adjust road geometry.

There is a reporting tool on both iOS/macOS Maps and you can input suggested edit such as displacing POI to its correct position.

Used that in the past and got a notification when suggestion was accepted & pushed to the map.

I’d guess it’s curated somehow.

Apple Maps allows this, at least on macOS. I've never looked for the option on iOS but I assume it's there somewhere too.

You can do that with Apple Maps as well, I can't say "always" but for a long time at least, though I can't speak for how fast they'll necessarily deal with it. But if you set a marker then there will be a "Report an Issue" button down below at the bottom of its info panel/pane. Amongst the options there is "Add a Place" which can also be a street, and there is a free form "Other Issue" (which you can attach a photo to as well) catch-all. I don't think Apple has any more advanced stuff like user proposed road geometry editing, which is too bad because it's painfully obvious where some simple algorithm has worked off a satellite image vs it having some human attention.

But there is definitely some edit crowd sourcing, it may just suffer from a smaller or less motivated user base. Speaking of the latter, I've never seen Apple really try to incentivize it either, whereas at least at one point Google had a fairly fleshed out actual gamification for Google Maps where people could sign up to be "Local Guides", earn points for constructive actions, and get badges that could be publicly displayed. Essentially free for Google (dunno if they ever gave anything else to top editors for PR, but they didn't promise it) but even simple public recognition of an icon can be surprisingly motivating for a lot of people. I don't know how active that still is and also vaguely remember stories about editing tools getting shut down a few years back, but at any rate Apple has never really tried anything like that at all AFAIK. Not that as a corporate culture they've ever really gotten gaming, period.

Good to know. Has this really been around for that long? I swear I was reading about this as an issue for Apple Maps just recently.

We should probably quantify "long", I know it's been a few years at least because I added a couple of businesses myself. But I guess it's already been well over 6 years since Apple Maps' initial launch (how time flies!), and there have been plenty of changes since then, so you could well argue even a few years isn't that long in the scale of the thing. And the 1.0 launch sure was rough a heck, not many such things where there has to be a public apology given let alone from Apple. Some of their initial ideas for how it would develop (with heavy 3rd party dev involvement for example) never really seemed to work out, and they've become more, "traditional" I guess over time in terms of data sources and doing the grunt work themselves (IIRC they started doing their own sensor vans for example like in 2015/2016?). At any rate though it's there now and has been for a bit, it's in the Mac version as well and I can see it even in older ones.

Having said all that, I just checked some of the entries I made way back when, which I did with full write ups, my source, photos, and in one case I was in fact the business head of IT and provided that from my work email and a device on our business Apple ID even. And I'm positive those were accepted and on the map for at least 6 months while I was still there. Yet now I look and nothing, and they definitely are still in business at the same location. That's kind of a crappy. If Apple accepts user submissions but then blows them away from time to time during map source fusion say it could explain some of their paucity of data and would discourage more submissions from those few who bothered in the first place.

I've had the same issue with locations on google maps a few times and iirc it's taken a bit longer than that.

What I really hate are mall locations. I wish pin markers put the actual stores in the right portion of the building(s) themselves... hate parking on the wrong side of the complex to find out that I parked on the wrong side. Increase that to when the temperatures are more extreme (under 40F in the north or over 100F in the southwest).

I'm looking forward to the day that privacy and convenience are mainstream again(if there were ever). This feature is a right step on that direction.

When was convenience not mainstream, except in the earlier days of the Internet before centralized logins (e.g. Google, Facebook), which are associated with a tradeoff in privacy?

Yeah, you're right. What I meant is that in our day they are mutually exclusive, either you have privacy or you have convenience. I like duckduckgo and I use it as my default search engine but we can agree that it lacks many of the convenient features Google maps has. So I'm looking forward to the day that privacy and convenience are the norm.

They were using an open source map company, not google maps. By that standard, I feel this is probably a privacy regression.

  I'm looking forward to the day when people know what they are talking about.

> They were using an open source map company, not google maps. By that standard, I feel this is probably a privacy regression.

I'm not sure this is a fair comparison. Open source is not the same as privacy-friendly.

Apple makes privacy a core-tenet of their product. I do not see the same stance from Mapbox.

Apples core tenet is making money, they have recently started making privacy a concern probably because they think that it will make money.

Every corporation’s legal core tenet is increasing shareholder value (i.e., make money). I’m more inclined to go with those who at least claim to protect privacy over those who don’t. :)

Every corporation claims to protect privacy

Google Claims to protect privacy as well. In fact they make a number of tools that are built just for that reason. But it's all marketing, and the tools are there only to really benefit Google. Just take a look at Android's Wi-Fi assistant that creates and automatic VPN to Google's servers.

My point is it isn't as back and white as companies claiming to protect privacy. At the end of the day Apple is just as bad.

sure, I raise an eyebrow at companies that 'protect privacy' but have an atrocious security record. You might try, but if you can't be bothered to check passwords for admin access in your own OS, I my not believe you have the capabilities to protect your own nuts.

I work at Mapbox. Not speaking officially for the company here (for that see https://www.mapbox.com/privacy/), but I can say it's definitely an internalized norm that in order to earn trust as a platform we need to be very careful with any user data we get. While user-generated location data does flow into updating our map, we are aggressive about anonymizing and aggregating that data as quickly as possible (including stripping out data on the client side).

But I agree Apple has consistently advertised their focus on privacy and backed it up with their actions.

Hey Chris, glad to hear that is an internal focus!

I hope for the sake of the Internet that one day discussions about privacy aren’t needed because it’s the default everywhere. Then everyone wins. :)

Except advertisers and industries propped up by that model

Apple Maps has seen impressive improvements in the past couple years. With Mapbox/OSM in the mix as well, I look forward to seeing where the competition in the maps space leads us.

Mapkit JS took me by surprise when it came out. But so far, it seems to have been a solid decision, especially at a time when many were looking for new solutions after Google Maps changes finally rolled out. And for the most part it looks pretty good.

(Disclosure: I work for Google but not on Maps, opinions mine and not my employer, etc etc. I wish I didn't have to write this so often.)

Eh ... What?! This thing isn't functioning at all! How did they think what they have now with Apply maps could ever replace what they had before in terms of functionality?! What were they thinking? Just to mention a few issues I hit on the first attempt of using it:

- I cannot search?! I can only search on DuckDuckGo, THEN click on the map tab and see a SINGLE location, no similar locations or whatever. And then I cannot in the map tab search? How ridiculous is that? Now I need to do a completely new DuckDuckGo search, hope that it will magically find the street or whatever I search, even if there are multiple ones in the same city. - I cannot look for directions from A to B?! When I click the "Directions" button I get redirected to bing.com, which is currently blocked to a 100%. I don't want to go to bing, I want to get DIRECTIONS, on the DuckDuckGo map tab and not on another website. - I cannot even ZOOM, wtf? I keep using the mouse wheel and nothing happens! This thing is so broken.

And this is only the first visit of the map tab. How they f'ed that up, omg.

The calls to MapKit seem to be going through a proxy on DDG's servers, which are currently (1/15/19 18:00 UTC) 403ing.

Sorry about that, we had a brief issue with our proxy, it should be working properly now.

One thing I notice is that there is no way to restrict search to the map area, or to refine by "Search this Area."

I've been waiting on a better alternative to google for many years. I've use DDG when I can but the quality indexes are just not there. Google was at the pinnacle of balance just before they got rid of uncle-sam and reg exp search options. Now every search is tailored to your previous metadata.

This map doesn't work for me. Completely blank.

Same. Does image search work for you at all?

Interestingly, it seems like the Maps data that Apple is providing here is inconsistent. In southern California, through the native apps I'm getting high-quality maps, while DuckDuckGo is still showing me the older low-quality ones.

Somewhat related but DuckDuckGo Image and Map search results have been broken for months for me. I just get blank, broken images. Anyone else have this problem?

Kind of defeats the purpose if I have to use google for half of my searches.

Some kind of extension blocking the images/js from loading?

Or faking/randomizing your UA? Some sites (e.g. YT) serves other image formats based on the UA string.

Https://Startpage.com

Why are people such fans of Ddg and not searx.me? searx is entirely open source and you can run your own instance.

Ddg reportedly does collect some information (?), and their core is closed source.

I think it's probably that DDG does a better job at marketing themselves. Whenever there is any sort of privacy scandal there always seems to be some comment from their PR dept.

Personally, I am highly skeptical regarding DDG and find much of their marketing to be hyperbolic (see the duck.com foolishness [0]). For me, I feel that if I'm just going to get Bing search results and Bing ads, I might as well just use Bing.

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/20/17595612/google-antitrust...

Does it have its own crawling engine?

I wasn't even aware DDG had maps at all since they never once showed up for me. Probably because I am entering Japanese addresses, and their address parser isn't recognizing them as such. As much as I wish to use it, much of DDG has been and continues to be really abysmal if you're living in non-English-speaking Asia. I really worry if they're aware and/or are bothering to improve this.

Excited to see DDG's local search improving. I once ordered take out from a restaurant in another state based on a careless DDG search...

She's not loading any tiles for me....

Caution: DuckDuckGo's Apple Maps might kill your macOS's default map (show completely blank map) if your app has non-English language setting. If so, open your active monitor and search "geod", kill it and run map app again. It can return your apple map app back to normal state.

How so?

Well looks like I wont be using DDG for directions then, their directions are going to be trash.

Cool I don’t have to bang Google for directions anymore!

I started using DDG (slowly trying to remove Google as much out of my daily life as possible) after reading about how Google ATAP tried to patent a MIT researchers life’s work without her knowledge or consent.

This decision to move away from open infrastructure actually clarifies something I’ve been thinking about DDG recently. When you think about it, DDG is actually very similar to Apple in terms of its offer to users. It is a closed service which offers privacy as part of its marketing. That’s not to dismiss it outright or say the offer is not useful or not sincere, both are valuable alternatives to Google, but in the long run their promise has no legal backing. Both could switch to a different model overnight if their incentives shifted.

We could spend a decade evangelising for DDG, it becomes a significant mainstream player, and then gets sold to someone with totally different priorities. I’m happy to be corrected if I’m wrong, is there a legal barrier to this scenario playing out?

Business models are probably stickier than tech stacks.

It’s not really a choice of one or the other, most companies that contribute to open infrastructure also have a business model that relies on that. For instance Red Hat, it can be bought but both the business model and the legal backing for the tech licensing are sticky.

A+ DDG! I have been using DDG (duck duck go) since Gabriel created it in 2008. It’s been my default search on all my devices. When I need to route searches through Google, I do, as Google is still king at knowing and giving you the exact results you want, whereas DDG, gives you great results, with a different algorithm on the type results plus the added security of what DDG is about. They don’t track you. They don’t save your searches. I don’t use apple maps as i use android, but I like that DDG continues to go against the grain and choose privacy over comfort.

Lastly, I know the bulk of my searches go through DDG so I don’t have to think about what I searched, on what devices, was it on a public net, was VPN enabled?? etc etc.. What are you thoughts? Do you use DDG?

> Google is still king at knowing and giving you the exact results you want

Not for me, it's not. The quality of Google search results for me has been falling for years now. These days, DDG and Google are about equally good on that score.

I suspect that it's because Google tries to tailor my search results to what it thinks I'm looking for rather than just giving me the results I actually asked for, and it's really, really terrible at it.

Totally. I find that most of my Google searches are not relevant. It started to go down hill once they started pushing ML on search. Google is a marketing platform and no longer a search engine.

Out of curiosity, why would Apple's privacy statement on searches be any different than Google's?

I do not know specifically as I have not read Apple Maps policy but to choose Apple Maps over Google Maps says a lot. I use google maps personally. Apple maps is getting better, but it's not google maps. So one can assume, the choice to choose apple over google means, IMHO, is that with Apple Maps they do not track as much as google would/does. Apple stance on privacy, publicly, has been pretty good. Tracking is everywhere and DDG still is sticking to their privacy first method.

Lastly, I love that I can dump random searches from my weird brain into DDG without the feeling that I'm giving some random machine, data that at some point can tell someone what I may want or do or have searched. Everyone knows what you're doing on the toilet, everybody poops, but we still close the door for privacy.

I wish they would have done a bit more testing: With Firefox I can't change my position by dragging (looks like an image) and with chrome, I can't zoom with the mouse wheel...

Is this the first consumer web interface for Apple Maps? I guess the JS toolkit has been around for about half a year now, but is anyone else significant publishing web maps with it?

duck duck go is pretty horrible compared to google, for search results... i wish it wasn't. Tried it, both myself and my less tech savvy wife, thought wtf is this?

Apple should launch an alternative to Google Maps on Android. I can slowly see the transition coming.

I love Here Maps too, it's good to have alternatives to Google products.

StartPage and Searx are two interesting alternatives to DDG.

Is there any point in talking about DDG "privacy" as long as they use yandex (which is basically an fsb (kgb) outlet) as a search backend?

As much as Google is an FBI outlet or what do you mean? Is there a point if DDG doesn't send personal data to yandex?

I'd expect DDG to not send my IP address or browser info to yandex. Is that not the case?

What's DDG's business model?

To get acquired by a bigger company.

The experience is already better. Thank you. Now please delete Yelp (or at least let me turn it off).

http://wikimapia.org can be a win-win to DDG

Their core is proprietary, therefore there is virtually no difference between Google and DDG in terms of privacy

DDG and Apple? seems fishy

Who uses Apple Maps?

Idiots

Why hasn't Apple bought DuckDuckGo?

I also think the name DuckDuckGo is too long and too cumbersome, they should consider rebranding to something simpler. Branding matters.

You can use duck.com and it'll redirect :)

They own duck.com now, figure it won't be long until they're rebranded as "Duck"

In December they acquired the name duck.com, maybe they'll do something with that. Right now it just redirects to duckduckgo.com

Apple is probably going to buy DuckDuckGo this year

Apple can buy the same search index access DDG has (and probably would have to re-negotiate DDGs existing contracts when taking them over) if it wants to get into search. Although DDG has some additions on top of that, if it'd be cheap enough those could be a reasonable deal for Apple.

I'm not sure Apple wants to get into the mess that offering a major search engine is.

Google is paying them quite well for the opportunity to be the search engine on Apple devices.

Re: DuckDuckGo will use Apple Maps

When you use Apple Maps to go anywhere, you do have to duck :-)

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