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Comment by jfoster | Hacker News Reader

"I don't care about privacy; I have nothing to hide."

Can I offer a variation of this one? I care about privacy. I wouldn't want a human to be looking over my searches. That said, if they're just using the data to serve me relevant ads and it's all either automated or aggregated so that I'm never personally identified, then I'm cool with it at the personal level.

I say "at the personal level" because I think there's still a practical problem when it comes to politics. It seems too easy to sway elections using it. Not even necessarily by shaping the results in any way. Simply by being able to identify the groups of users who will vote a particular way in particular electoral divisions, and then seeking to lift their voting rate above the average. (eg. by prompting/reminding them to vote)

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There is another problem, beyond the initial ads-based business. This information gathered about you, albeit anonymously, is correlated. This helps train models about groups of people, in order to derive value from group information. It can then be sold to insurances, banks, etc.

Derived information may look like: "Clojure programmers buy a new computer every 3 years on average" "Women in medium socio-economic groups tend to have kids at 31 years old"

But maybe I'm a programmer that cares about waste, and use the hell out of my computers, until it is completely unusable, making them last way longer. Maybe I'm a woman with trouble getting pregnant, and I won't have kids until much later.

Nevertheless, insurances and banks will use that information against me.

This information grouping you take part of, is de-humanizing. Humans are infinitely complex, ever-evolving creatures and categorizing us is profitable business. I do not want to be treated through the lens of the probability of a group I belong to, no matter how small the box.

The smaller the box, the more invasive it feels. But even general (codified in law) categorisations such as gender already feel discriminating in our modern society.

Banning discrimination based on correlatory truths has its own costs as well. There is no simple solution to this.

DuckDuckGo is nothing but an annoyance for me, but only when I set it as my standard search engine. Because 90% of my searches are practical, currency conversions, calculations that I could’ve done in a calculator but didn’t, maps locations, directions, public transportation times, and, opening hours. DDG is absolutely terrible at this in my country. Google isn’t, and that’s why it’s probably going to remain my standard search engine for some time to come.

What annoys me about google though, isn’t the personalised advertising, it’s the personalised results. Google obviously knows I play Blood Bowl and collect various things for it, but as a result, my first two google page results are nothing but advertisements. Even if I was actually searching for information. A couple of years ago I don’t think I had ever clicked beyond page 1 on google, these days I find myself turning to direct forum searches. Searches on DDG or even directly on HN, FB or Reddit because all google wants to do is link me to sale sites.

> What annoys me about google though, isn’t the personalised advertising, it’s the personalised results.

That's true. It's almost subconscious for me now go incognito prior to searching or visiting a website if it's something I'm aware that I'm only temporarily interested in, in order to avoid it becoming part of my profile.

I don't think personalisation is a completely bad idea, but I would like to have some way to interface with it.

1. "Google, what are the things you think I'm into?"

2. "Google, I'm actually not interested in _____."

3. "Google, you should know that I'm into _____."

The thing is that DDG does not give people the privacy they want.

Some people do not want privacy. They are on every social media network sharing everything about their life anyway.

Some people do want privacy but are not tin-foil hat about it. These people get their expectations of privacy met by other means, not being on every social network being one of them. Then there are the practical measures of running ad-blockers and other browser tools to prevent tracking. These tools are generally unobtrusive even if lifting the ad-blocker for a page is a daily occurrence.

People in this category get the privacy concessions they want and are probably okay with Google knowing what it does. They are not going to go full tin-foil hat with some Tor onion browser on the end of a VPN. Using DDG takes you into this territory. Everyone knows their search results are just different, not the standard Google fayre. The secret sauce is just this claim to privacy that people are able to get enough of with other means, such as running ad-blockers.

With the limited offering that DDG is there has to be an overlap between those who are obsessed about privacy (tin-foil hat and probably 'preppers'...) and the DDG user base. They need to get out more and add to the internets.

I would like to see a search engine that offers people the option to raise their HTML game by using the semantic elements for content structure that Google and Bing ignore. Content matters but so does HTML. This could be easy to game with people getting rid of div style HTML to replace it with articles, headers, sections, navs, asides and footers, with inline elements such as dfn and abbr, but I would be quite happy if the web was written that way. Even better if there was a search engine that worked with it.

Most people and I mean upwards of 98% (even the tech savvy ones) don't care much about privacy as much as the HN bubble seems to(or pretends to).

It's also hard to argue against it. In the end, Google uses all that data to make more money with ads. And having relevant ads for your taste isn't necessarily bad for many.

The amount of data collection is truly bad for people living in totalitarian regimes or have sensitive jobs but that's not the majority of friends for most of us. For the rest, the lack of privacy has no negative impact on their life and is unlikely to have in the near future, so there's no reason to change.

Wanting change to benefit all of us is what we try (and fail) with preventing climate warming.

I understand your point but from my perspective I care a lot. Things do not stop there; it's the nature of companies to take more and more for entirely rational reasons (money), but those reasons eat deeper into the boundary between them and you.

If one allows them the thin end of the wedge, one will get the rest, slowly, and slowly accept it a la boiling frog, rationalising it all the way (maybe not you specifically, but many will. Why? It's the easiest thing to do).

You've already mentioned the problem of politics, in effect you've just acknowledged the rest of the wedge will appear. There will be other reasons.

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