Hacker News Reader

Comment by freediver | Hacker News Reader

The above mentioned privacy issue with DuckDuckGo exists whether you are logged in or not into Chrome.

1. By default DDG keeps your query in URL (for example duckduckgo.com/?q=blue+widgets) so that exposes your DDG searches to Google through Chrome

2. Whatever browser you use, if anyone accessed your browsing history they would know exactly what you searched for

These can be changed in DDG settings by changing requests from GET to POST but there is probably lack of awareness among users who come to DDG because of the whole 'privacy' thing. More on DDG privacy issues https://choosetoencrypt.com/search-engines/duckduckgos-bigge...

View on HN

But nobody yet has confirmed this issue. It's been mentioned but without any supporting evidence.

Does anyone have a link or other evidence that definitively shows that Chrome sends my browsing history to Google independently of my signed-in status? That's what was implied. That's what I find hard to believe. That's what has not yet been demonstrated in this thread.

No problem! We'll just check the source code for Chrome.

...

Ah. We can't. Chrome is closed-source, because Google wants to... Say, why is Chrome closed-source? What do Google add to Chromium that they don't want you to see?

Point well made, but my question stands! If the OP's allegation is true, someone has sniffed the packets. There's a blog post somewhere. There's something.

I just want that something here, for the record. As it stands, I am dismissing the allegation as baseless. I'm not sticking up for Chrome, which I do not trust, but this allegation has no evidence.

The local privacy of GET vs POST for submitting a query is a super cool distinction to point out, thanks

I went looking for this setting in DDG because I didn't understand you at first, but you're saying that DuckDuckGo could change their website to hide the query in a request body instead of the querystring, not that its a user-accessible feature, right?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com