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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

Pretty much the low hanging fruit of PR efforts.

Propose a legislation that has zero chance of ever coming into effect and then watch as all of your target audience pat you on the back for all the great work.

Problem of course is that this isn't how legislation gets passed in the US. Especially these days when you have Democrats, Republicans and the President all with completely different stances on privacy. And of course a 2020 election with a President who is relying almost exclusively on digital marketing and would be hurt by this legislation.

If this was a SuperPAC with a high profile lobbying firm then you could take all of this a little more seriously.

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In the meantime DDG makes almost 100% of its money from tracking users via revenue sharing agreement with Yahoo/Microsoft and Amazon.

Indeed, no one talks about the privacy implications of referral links, although when it comes to the agreement with Bing, etc., I think everything is proxied. Not so much with the direct links to Amazon. Amazon knows when you are a DDG user.

Even though affiliate links are a low hanging fruit in regards to making money with search engines, it is not made transparent by DuckDuckGo.

They also use all the data they can get, they just tell us they get rid of the identifying information as fast as possible (IP address). I wouldn't be surprised if, from a privacy-standpoint, using Google and DDG as a non-logged in user is basically the same, especially if you use google with an ad blocker. The process of Google ads is basically to have a profile based on cookie data, which the user can easily control.

yegg (CEO @ DDG): "We've actually been using Yahoo technology along with our own and others since the very beginning of DuckDuckGo. Over the past year though we've been working on a stronger partnership with Yahoo so we can get access to more features like date filters that everyone has been asking for (that one in particular is our most requested feature by far).

With regards to the ads, nothing is changing in terms of ad privacy/tracking or our privacy policy in general. Ads should just become more relevant."

Have you noticed "improving.duckduckgo.com", the analytics service that logs all requests ?

"To be clear, this means we cannot ever tell what individual people are doing since everyone is anonymous"

Oh, except the IP address, right. Fun fact (experiment now removed): https://web.archive.org/web/20180910042004im_/http://image.b...

But Yahoo search itself has been, for the past four years, a mishmash of Bing, Google and Yahoo results. I wonder which mix of the three Yahoo will pass along when using its API, versus using its search page.

Funny enough, everything is anonymous on paper when you take away the IP address.

Except, it is not, because the data profiles still exist.

In that way, Google could advertize itself as being anonymous, as they probably delete IP addresses relatively quickly as well.

"Canvas defender" style features very often produce false positives (code unrelated to tracking that gets blocked anyway because it's hard to distinguish). You'd have to show the code that produced it for this "fun fact" to have any relevance.

This. Also DDG and Brave are probably the shadiest small tech companies I've seen in many years. They use extensive and aggressive advertising and sneaky marketing techniques with nothing more but attacking big companies using their paid minions (youtubers, bloggers, influencers on reddit an 4chan), ironically the same big companies that their products are built upon. I wonder if a company like Google would ever sue them or that would make these companies a favor because all they need is more exposure as the little fighter who takes on the evil giant and we all know who we should be more sympathetic with when we see a fight between the big evil guy and the little one.

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