Please let me pay for this service. It looks worth having and: 1) I'd like to know that it is funded by users, rather than advertisers and thus can resist privacy invasion presuures. 2) I'd like to have some basis for belief that it will be around longer than it takes the VC money to run out, (or the marketing budget, or whatever non-sustainable pot it comes from).
Our product vision is an "easy button" for privacy, an all-in-one privacy app. Email protection is part of that, along with search, browsing, etc. Put another way, we see email protection as part of our core product, and within our app we autofill duck addresses in email forms.
We will take your comment into consideration, though we prefer free services where possible so more people can get privacy protection, which is in line with our mission. This service comes with it a set of privacy guarantees here: https://duckduckgo.com/email/privacy-guarantees and we will not be putting ads on it.
If a product is subsidized by a company's other products, it's hard for me to believe it'll be around forever. For an email product, that's a huge problem, because I use my address in hundreds of contexts that take a long time to identify and migrate, much longer than a typical company's sunsetting notice.
EDIT: The parent comment was edited to note that they perceive DDG Email as part of the core product, not a separate product. That's helpful to know, but I'm still skeptical that that's sustainable in the long term. This would not be the first time a feature was cut from a product because it was too expensive to maintain. I'll be waiting to see their unified privacy solution really take off before I place any bets on this feature.
Just because you're a product doesn't mean the service is not sustainable. It should be very easy for them to figure out whether the feature is profitable or not compared to other acquisition methods.
Fastmail’s email servers are in the US and the company is in Australia. Both are in the five eyes jurisdictions, plus Australia has some draconian laws (see Assistance and Access Bill, though email itself is generally not a secure enough channel). ProtonMail is in Switzerland, which is better surveillance-wise, but it still complies (as one would expect a company to) with court orders and has disclosed the IP address of an activist due to a court order.
Fastmail supports IMAP, which means you can use any email client on a desktop or phone. ProtonMail does not support IMAP directly on desktops and requires a “bridge application” for IMAP. This is provided for paying customers. ProtonMail does not have any support for IMAP on smartphones, where you’re either left to using the browser or using the ProtonMail app.
While one may marginally improve some aspects of the service and has strategic value, the other actually moves the needle in terms of an end-user's overall privacy.
But presumably DDG has contractual agreements with Microsoft so “no longer has an index” is a hypothetical that isn’t really grounded in reality or something that would be likely to happen without warning.
And if Bing is no longer viable at some point for some reason, that would be a good reason to change the priority of building an index.
But clearly DDG feels secure enough in their current agreement, and as of now, we have no reason to believe otherwise.
You have "email protection" but do you have nice stuff like sandbox detonation and private intel partnerships with companies like Proofpoint? That as a premium might be worth charging. Heck, even public yara rule scanning and allowing inbox owners to set things like DMARC enforcement and custom rules and actions would be a nice premium.
This is also the reason I'm not particularly excited about DDG in general. They have exactly the same business model as Google, so there is no reason for me to feel confident they won't follow the same trajectory as Google.
Being funded by search ads was never an issue with google and privacy until they switch from contextual ads and morphed into personal ads.
DDG winning search on bing search isn't the same trajectory. At best lycos like would be the most likely trajectory.
DuckDuckGo in 2022 is an upstart search provider promising a clean, minimal, user-focused ad-supported search experience as an alternative to entrenched search engines like Google.
I'm old enough to remember when Google was the new and exciting thing (just give it a try and ignore the stupid-sounding name!). For the longest time there wasn't even such a thing as a Google account, it just saved preferences like safe-search locally using cookies, and ads were just a small distinctly colored text bar above the organic search results, directly related to your search keywords.
Not sure how paying for this service makes it any less likely that DDG will flip a switch to make that targeted advertising money though. That temptation will exist either with a paid service or a non targeted ad supported service.
I have very little tolerance for companies that double-dip though. I subscribed to the New York Times for a while, but cancelled, in part, because they still stuffed their pages with ads both explicit and implicit.
I really want the option to turn off certain sites (eg. w3schools) entirely from search results, not just demote them.
Open this page in the DuckDuckGo app to continue.”
Reminds me of Reddit shenanigans…
Contrapositive yes, converse no. Companies could still make money from both sides of a market. Look at the lack of net neutrality. Look also at how ISPs used to be able to sell your data, despite you paying them !
I prefer paying 10$ a month and forget about mail server issues and wondering if my mail is going to the spam folder..
That being said, there’s probably not much need to pay more than $5/mo. I’m very happy with Fastmail at $60/yr.
Newspapers is free or dirt cheap. You basically pay the paper and distribution costs if anything. Those that do charge to read it online don't show ads to subscribers.
> Cable tv
The main selling point of cable TV was no ads. Eventually they started adding ads, and that's probably the reason cable tv is fading away.
> Netflix
Doesn't have ads right now, and if they do in future, people will just move away.
Which support custom domain and more features, and not locked to a specific browser.
Both open source and self-hostable, SL is by Proton(Mail).
Please stop censoring search results, no matter how morally/politically opposed to them the organization may be. Privacy + Censorship is not a good mix.
The truth needs no defense.
We (DuckDuckGo) subsequently made a help page to explain it in detail: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne.... Tl;dr: we don’t censor, we don’t move things so far down that they are effectively censored, we don't evaluate individual stories or narratives for "truth", and we don’t rank based on any political agenda or opinions. This is just a summary though so would read the help page for details.
I also put out a clarification thread about various misconceptions that included this topic amongst others (like the fact that no, we’re not owned by Google), but the help page referenced above is the best and most thorough explanation of our news rankings. https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1515635886855233537
This is censorship, since DDG is now deciding what is considered "Disinformation".
Your clarification thread does not state DDG is not down-ranking these sites based on what DDG feels is "disinformation". It merely asserts DDG is not purging results - these are two very different things.
Just to be clear, I too support Ukraine, and am aghast at the deliberately misleading information ("disinformation") coming out of the Russian War Machine. However, as I previously wrote, the truth needs no defense. Hiding away things we don't like doesn't make them go away, it just makes them go underground. We need this information freely available so it can be discussed and disproven out in the open.
If users wanted curated search results, they might as well use Google or Bing...
Lastly, to repeat, Privacy + Censorship (of any kind) do not go together. This was quite a large misstep for DDG, and has burned a lot of trust.
That said, the help page I referenced is the most detailed explanation of how our news rankings work: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne....
To be clear, that means we do not have a definition of "disinformation". I'm to blame for tweeting something that was highly ambiguous but we were never actually doing what we've been accused of doing.
It's a very tough situation, needing to assure people that you honestly aren't doing what you claimed and just misspoke.
1- https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-neo-naz...
Edit: My bad, I missed a legit link in parent comment. That said, that link should have been front & center. (Edit 2: it now is. Good on you!)