Hacker News Reader

Comment by jister | Hacker News Reader

The rest of the world doesn't care about NSA surveillance so 600% doesn't really mean anything and is meaningless. Hell, a lot of people don't even know what Bing is!

View on HN

If anything people outside of the US care more about the NSA revelations. Because it's an foreign government snooping in shit that they have 0 business to snoop in.

Excuse me, I live in England and I use DuckDuckGo - Surveillance and tracking is just as prevalent over here as it is in the US, ever heard of GCHQ?

Likely even more so. The U.S. is at least making symbolic (if not substantial) changes to laws like letting provisions of the PATRIOT ACT expire, while the UK is secretly making domestic spying legal through secret laws.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-05/18/gchq-hacking-...

It's not just the UK: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

I also am British and use DDG, but the comment was about the vast majority of web users around the world, who still type google into google to get to google.com

You are correct, the vast majority of web users do not care about surveillance.

But the early adopters do, and these are the high technologists, the users of HackerNews, and it appears that these are the ones driving the change. The other replies to your comment sadly seem to equate the "rest of the world" as non US early adopters / users on HN.

This may or may not lead to the late adopters coming along to DDG in a few years. If they come, it will not be because of privacy matters, or the bang syntax but because a) it would be better and/or b) everyone else is doing it.

The rest of the world is what NSA surveillance is about, I believe. Spying on Americans is just collateral damage.

We absolutely care; DDG user from Liverpool here. Not just because of NSA surveillance but because of privacy concerns in general, and especially concerns regarding Google.

Also from Liverpool and agreed on all points.

Germany is still up in arms about it - Snowden is the cause of the biggest strain in US-German relationships since I don't know when. (1945?)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com