There are substantial privacy and civil liberty issues with DuckDuckGo. Here they are spot-lighted:
torsocks dig @8.8.8.8 mx duckduckgo.com +tcp | grep -E '^\w'
==> “…duckduckgo-com.mail.protection.outlook.com”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.
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.
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I just registered yesterday and did not use an e-mail address.
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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?
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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.
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Can probably run it through Tor
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That’s ultimately why I left the last time. That and the speed in which most instances load is terrible.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.