There are substantial privacy and civil liberty issues with DuckDuckGo. Here they are spot-lighted:
Nefarious History of DDG founder & CEO:
DDG’s founder (Gabriel Weinberg) has a
history
of privacy abuse, starting with his founding of
Names DB, a
surveillance capitalist service designed to coerce naive users to
submit sensitive information about their friends. (2006)
Weinberg’s
motivation for creating DDG was not actually to “spread privacy”; it was to
create something big, something that would compete with big
players. As a privacy abuser during the conception of DDG (Names
Database), Weinberg sought to become a big-name legacy. Privacy
is Weinberg’s means (not ends) in that endeavor. Clearly he
doesn’t value privacy – he values perception of privacy.
Direct Privacy Abuse:
DDG was caught violating its own
privacy policy by issuing tracker cookies.
DDG is currently collecting users’ operating systems and
everything they highlight in the search results. (to verify
this, simply hit F12 in your browser and select the “network”
tab. Do a search with javascript enabled. Highlight some text on
the screen. Mouseover the traffic rows and see that your
highlighted text, operating system, and other details relating to
geolocation are sent to DDG. Then change the query and submit.
Notice that the previous query is being transmitted with the new
query to link the queries together)
When clicking an ad on the DDG results page, all data available
in your session is sent to the advertiser, which is why the Epic
browser project refuses
to set DDG as the default browser.
Censorship:
Some people replace Google with DDG in order to avoid censorship. DDG is not the answer.
DDG is complying with the “celebrity threesome injunction”.
CloudFlare: DDG promotes one of the largest
privacy abusing
tech giants and adversary to the Tor community: CloudFlare Inc. DDG
results give high rankings to CloudFlare sites, which consequently
compromises privacy, net neutrality, and anonymity:
Anonymity: CloudFlare DoS attacks Tor users, causing substantial damage to the Tor network.
Privacy: All CloudFlare sites are surreptitiously MitM’d by design.
Net neutrality: CloudFlare’s attack on Tor users causes access inequality, the centerpiece to net neutrality.
DDG T-shirts are sold using a
CloudFlare site, thus
surreptitiously sharing all order information (name, address,
credit card, etc) with CloudFlare despite their statement at the
bottom of the page saying “DuckDuckGo is an Internet privacy
company that empowers you to seamlessly take control of your
personal information online, without any tradeoffs.” (2019)
DDG hires Microsoft for email service: torsocks dig @8.8.8.8 mx duckduckgo.com +tcp | grep -E '^\w' ==> “…duckduckgo-com.mail.protection.outlook.com”
DDG is
partnered
with Yahoo (aka Oath; plus Verizon and AOL by extension). DDG
helps Yahoo profit by patronizing Yahoo’s API for search results,
and also through advertising. The Verizon
corporate conglomerate is evil in many ways:
Yahoo, Verizon, and AOL all supported CISPA (unwarranted surveillance bills)
Yahoo, Verizon, and AOL all use DNSBLs to block individuals from running their own mail servers, thus forcing an over-share of e-mail metadata with a relay.
Verizon and AOL both drug test their employees, thus intruding on their privacy outside of the workplace.
Verizon supports the TTP treaty.
Yahoo voluntarily ratted out a human rights journalist (Shi Tao) to the Chinese gov w/out warrant, leading to his incarceration.
Yahoo recently recovered “deleted” e-mail to convict a criminal. The deleted e-mail was not expected to be recoverable per the Yahoo Privacy Policy.
Verizon received $16.8 billion in Trump tax breaks, then immediately laid off thousands of workers.
(2016) Yahoo caught surreptitiously monitoring Yahoo Mail messages for the NSA.
Advertising Abuses & Corruption:
DDG consumed a room at FOSDEM 2018 to deliver a sales pitch despite
its proprietary non-free server code, then dashed out without
taking questions. Shame on FOSDEM organizers for allowing this corrupt
abuse of precious resources.
Tor Project accepted a $25k “contribution” (read: bribe) from
DDG, so you’ll find that DDG problems are down-played. This is
why Tor Browser defaults to using DDG and why Tor Project
endorses DDG over Ss – and against the interests of
the privacy-seeking Tor community. The EFF also pimps DDG – a
likely consequence of EFF’s close ties to Tor Project.
For the record, this is how Tor Project responds to criticism about
their loyalty toward DuckDuckGo (their benefactor) in IRC:
18:20 < psychil> if torbrowser is going to be recommended, it should also be open to scrutiny. in the absence of that transparency, you create an untrustworthy forum.
18:20 < psychil> we’ve seen a loyalty from TB toward duckduckgo, but DDG is in partnership with Verizon, Yahoo, AOL et. al.
18:21 < psychil> all CISPA-sponsoring companies
18:22 < psychil> if ppl choose to trust them fair enough, but this trust shouldn’t be pushed on every user weighing their choice of browsers
18:26 -!- mode/#tor [-b psychil@!@*] by ChanServ
18:27 < YY_Bozhinsky> psychil: i am using Tor (thanks to Tor Devs)… PLUS brain - good bundle. I am happy. And please, don’t rush to change Reality (do it slowly with love and respect). Because it’s home for many ppl. They construct their lives in it. Think twice before ruining that. Please.
18:27 -!- mode/#tor [+b psychil!@] by ChanServ
18:27 -!- psychil was kicked from #tor by ChanServ [wont stop the FUD]
Indeed, Tor Project is notoriously fast to censor any discourse (no matter how civil) when it supports a narrative that doesn’t align with their view / propaganda.
There is too much censorship & shenannigans like concealing censorship from modlogs to trust lemmy.ml anymore. I just saw a post about how the admins removed a community creator and quietly put someone else in control.
And I believe that privacy on the Internet does not exist. And this is my main argument. In the modern, indexed model of the Internet, privacy is impossible. https://utopia.fans/privacy/the-myth-of-the-privacy/ Yes, you can use privacy tools, which to some extent reduce the vulnerability of personal data, but this is still not an option. It has long been proven how global corporations hunt for our data and make money from it, and besides, the hacker community hunts for them, because they can then be sold on the darknet.
They also need to supply your IP address in order to serve geo-specific search results, which they do for the Bing API, effectively passing on your PII with every search.
NB: Can’t believe I had to register here with an e-mail address to comment about privacy…
Problem I have with searx is it does no regional searches at all - I just can’t find what I’m looking for in my own country. Results seem to be .com results. I see a Github issue was opened for that about 4 years ago and is still open.
I notice that DDG does allow users to set their search method to POST requests and support redirects to prevent search leakage. Partly the problem of browser and OS etc identity is our own browsers that are sending this info? DDG does do good regional search too.
So my big challenge is give me a metasearch engine that can at least do regional searches. For someone living in the US they probably don’t have a problem with “global” results, but outside the US we need results for locally in Botswana, South Africa, Egypt, etc and language is no good to filter on.
NB: Can’t believe I had to register here with an e-mail address to comment about privacy…
Supplying an email address on Lemmy used to be optional. Has that changed?
Problem I have with searx is it does no regional searches at all
I think that’s determined by the searx instance. Some instances let you choose your UI language, as well as the results language. You can also do “site:de” if you want to search *.de sites for example.
I notice that DDG does allow users to set their search method to POST requests and support redirects to prevent search leakage.
Why would POST prevent leakage? As long as the site is HTTPS, the query is encrypted regardless of whether it’s HTTPPOST or HTTPGET.
I was considering self-hosting my own SearX instance for personal use.
Not going to lie though, I really do enjoy the aesthetic customization of the JS ver of DDG, which SearX seems to lack. But I could be wrong and just haven’t toyed enough with it?
As far as results, I can’t say how different they are to DDG. I probably will switch to SearX for a little and see how I like. Can anyone comment on the aesthetic customization part though?
https://www.mojeek.com/ has it’s own index, but is smaller than Bing and Google and caters more for English and European languages. They were the first engine in the world to have a no tracking policy
Startpage is not linked to half as many privacy abuses as DDG. But it still makes sense to replace both of them with searxes.eu.org, which is the only search engine that goes as far as to filter out CloudFlare sites. Note that Searxes down ATM due to attack.
What about qwant.com?
They do have their own index and are based in Europe, out of US privacy violating agencies.
Not open source sadly. But I have been using it for about a year and the results are great.
The privacy policy is where a supplier can attest that they are executing an unmodified copy of a published free software program. So DDG could publish their source code and then make themselves legally bound to execute the code as-is.
Obviously considering the OP, DDG has things to hide. If they were to hypothetically take that step, users would still be left with trusting DDG, who has already been caught violating their privacy policy – but there’s value to having the accountability.
To answer u/koalp, searx is actually free software, and likely many searx instances run unmodified copies of it. I don’t know of any instances that guarantee that they run unmodified code, however.
I just wish both of them had a more polished UI, so I could better recommend it to normies. MetaGer is a little better in this regard, but none of them come even close of startpage and DDGs in the normie appeal category, which just makes harder for people that aren’t 100% devoted to focus on privacy to switch.
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don’t promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Update?
The updated article is here:
http://techrights.org/2021/03/15/duckduckgo-in-2021/
There is too much censorship & shenannigans like concealing censorship from modlogs to trust lemmy.ml anymore. I just saw a post about how the admins removed a community creator and quietly put someone else in control.
deleted by creator
If you care about censorship then why did you escape Reddit for Lemmy of all the alternatives?
And I believe that privacy on the Internet does not exist. And this is my main argument. In the modern, indexed model of the Internet, privacy is impossible. https://utopia.fans/privacy/the-myth-of-the-privacy/ Yes, you can use privacy tools, which to some extent reduce the vulnerability of personal data, but this is still not an option. It has long been proven how global corporations hunt for our data and make money from it, and besides, the hacker community hunts for them, because they can then be sold on the darknet.
Anyone has an opinion on startpage.com? This would be the best alternative imho.
I would recommend MataGer as they are a non profit and have their own crawlers.
deleted by creator
Startpage is only slightly better than DDG, but quite far from being the “best” alternative. Startpage financially feeds Google.
Ss is the best alternative (Tor required).
They also need to supply your IP address in order to serve geo-specific search results, which they do for the Bing API, effectively passing on your PII with every search.
NB: Can’t believe I had to register here with an e-mail address to comment about privacy…
Problem I have with searx is it does no regional searches at all - I just can’t find what I’m looking for in my own country. Results seem to be .com results. I see a Github issue was opened for that about 4 years ago and is still open.
I notice that DDG does allow users to set their search method to POST requests and support redirects to prevent search leakage. Partly the problem of browser and OS etc identity is our own browsers that are sending this info? DDG does do good regional search too.
So my big challenge is give me a metasearch engine that can at least do regional searches. For someone living in the US they probably don’t have a problem with “global” results, but outside the US we need results for locally in Botswana, South Africa, Egypt, etc and language is no good to filter on.
deleted by creator
Supplying an email address on Lemmy used to be optional. Has that changed?
I think that’s determined by the searx instance. Some instances let you choose your UI language, as well as the results language. You can also do “site:de” if you want to search *.de sites for example.
Why would POST prevent leakage? As long as the site is HTTPS, the query is encrypted regardless of whether it’s HTTPPOST or HTTPGET.
deleted by creator
I just registered yesterday and did not use an e-mail address.
deleted by creator
This has inspired me to start testing out Searx as my default again.
I love searx but instances keep getting taken down, or results not coming back from the main sources.
I was considering self-hosting my own SearX instance for personal use. Not going to lie though, I really do enjoy the aesthetic customization of the JS ver of DDG, which SearX seems to lack. But I could be wrong and just haven’t toyed enough with it? As far as results, I can’t say how different they are to DDG. I probably will switch to SearX for a little and see how I like. Can anyone comment on the aesthetic customization part though?
deleted by creator
Well you could host it on a VPS, but still I tried it out and it was pretty shit I found. Idk. I just could not find it nice to use.
deleted by creator
Can probably run it through Tor
deleted by creator
That’s ultimately why I left the last time. That and the speed in which most instances load is terrible.
deleted by creator
https://www.mojeek.com/ has it’s own index, but is smaller than Bing and Google and caters more for English and European languages. They were the first engine in the world to have a no tracking policy
Startpage is not linked to half as many privacy abuses as DDG. But it still makes sense to replace both of them with searxes.eu.org, which is the only search engine that goes as far as to filter out CloudFlare sites. Note that Searxes down ATM due to attack.
There are a lot of other searx instances, eg searx.info.
PSA: This changed to https://searx.space/
None of them filter out CloudFlare sites. Only searxes.eu.org.
deleted by creator
What about qwant.com? They do have their own index and are based in Europe, out of US privacy violating agencies. Not open source sadly. But I have been using it for about a year and the results are great.
deleted by creator
The privacy policy is where a supplier can attest that they are executing an unmodified copy of a published free software program. So DDG could publish their source code and then make themselves legally bound to execute the code as-is.
Obviously considering the OP, DDG has things to hide. If they were to hypothetically take that step, users would still be left with trusting DDG, who has already been caught violating their privacy policy – but there’s value to having the accountability.
To answer u/koalp, searx is actually free software, and likely many searx instances run unmodified copies of it. I don’t know of any instances that guarantee that they run unmodified code, however.
deleted by creator
I just wish both of them had a more polished UI, so I could better recommend it to normies. MetaGer is a little better in this regard, but none of them come even close of startpage and DDGs in the normie appeal category, which just makes harder for people that aren’t 100% devoted to focus on privacy to switch.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
This thread does an interesting comparison:
https://lemmy.ml/post/29179
YaCy is a crawler. It’s a great tool for supplying your own search engine to the public, but end users will find searx nodes more practical.