Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

The filter bubble thing is overstated. There are times when you want a filter bubble, when you found a piece of information and want to dig deeper on related subjects, a "conversational" interface that has at least short term memory offers big benefits. Do you really want to ask questions to an entity which acts like it has anterograde amnesia? Can you imagine Captain Picard having to continue to remind the computer of the enterprise about context?

Google's 'long term memory' offers lots of benefits too, and 90% of the time, the filter bubble is the correct answer. Like when I search for a particular business on the desktop, and then later I search on my mobile device in Google Maps, and the very first auto-suggest after typing 1-2 characters it the business I searched for yesterday. This is awesome given how irritating it is to enter stuff on mobile devices, especially when in motion, the fewer characters typed the better.

Most of the privacy issues can be solved just by opening up an incognito window. You can choose with 1 stroke whether you want a bubble or not.

The privacy issue I have is that governments can come in and request all data companies have about me, and there is nothing companies can do about this. There is no privacy promise they can make to me that can withstand a government request.

The only defence is to ensure the data does not exist.

In practice, this means using an incognito window almost all the time. Simply the fact that I'm on the other end of an IP logged in to a service is information I'd rather not share. And that's just too onerous, so instead I ensure my main browser isn't logged in to any services, amongst other defensive measures.

Personally, I prefer this: [DuckDuckGo Privacy](https://duckduckgo.com/privacy)

To this: [Incognito mode (browse in private) - Chrome Help](https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95464?hl=en)

Sometimes it's better to pay the price of a few extra characters to retain some control.

http://ddg.gg <- fewer chars

And a domain from Guernsey, who are unlikely to mess around with things. It always baffles me when I see startups using things like Libyan (.ly) and even Syrian (.sy) domains to make some cutesy word.

unlike.ly and cute.sy? parked.

> Personally, I prefer this: [DuckDuckGo Privacy](https://duckduckgo.com/privacy)

Ahh, but if the NSA got a secret court order commanding DDG to start collecting data quietly, would users know? Do you think DDG would go the way of Lavabit and shut down voluntarily?

That's a really good question. My impression is that Gabriel Weinberg and team are building something on the side of privacy and users. I don't know with any certainty what Mr. Weinberg would do in such a face-off, but at this moment in time, I personally feel more comfortable with DDG than Google. My feelings are simply mine and based upon what I've observed so far with DDG and Google. Google just won't close shop - DDG might close shop. I trust DDG more.

I really think we need a search command to break out of the bubble on google, you are right 90% of the time its the right choice but the other 10 your screwed, some trial and error with removing the offending terms but sometimes it just doesnt.

https://startpage.com/ gives you Google search results minus personalization.

And startpage.com is located in the Netherlands and not in the USA like DuckDuckGo. I can not trust USA services anymore. DuckDuckGo is located in the Amazon Cloud and Amazon is the next target of the NSA.

startpage.com includes ads from Google and forwards you upon a result click to google.com/aclk for tracking purposes.

Please do not spread this site saying it does not submit data to Google. It does guaranteed for the ads, and knowing the search engine scene a bit I would also bet that they submit your IP and useragent to Google for every search query.

It seems recently everybody accepts those claims about privacy protecting search engines without checking anything.

Relax, all he said was that it removes the personalization, which it does.

As a sibling comment says, I didn't actually make any privacy statements.

However, startpage's help pages claim not to pass on IP addresses, useragents, cookies, or other identifying information. This claimed-independent report says so too: https://www.european-privacy-seal.eu/awarded-seals/de-110022... — verifying such statements is hard; believe what you will.

I agree, it seems clicking on the Google ads (rather than search results) does put a request via google.com/aclk. Privacy conscious users could block ads to avoid such mistakes. Of course startpage must send some data to google: the search terms are needed to get the search results themselves (as well as for selecting the ads). That could be a privacy leak, for example if simultaneously searching for a name and a sensitive topic. It doesn't seem nearly as bad as tying the search terms to a unique identifier across searches however.

Google can't not track which results are clicked for which queries. It'd be impossible to build a decent algorithm without measuring how well it works for people.

Exactly, the bubble it's not bad in all use cases. Nevertheless it would be really great if you actually have a real control over it: switching from one "bubble" to another for different contexts or disabling it altogether.

Captain Picard definitely lives in a filter bubble. So many times he has been fooled by the bad guy is just embarrassing.

"Google's 'long term memory' offers lots of benefits too"

Especially to NSA and local police. NSA can't store everything forever so Google chips in.

Are you a Google employee by any chance? If so, your tune would change if Apple was doing it and Google wasn't.

Needs more accusations of ill intent.

Apple does do it? How do you think siri works?

please read my comment again. It's covered in there

Reply on news.ycombinator.com