DuckDuckGo Ups Ante: Gives $300K to ‘Raise the Standard of Trust
Eric Schmidt said:
If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/07/google-ceo-on-privacy-if_n_383105.html
I am a translator!
>Eric Schmidt said:
If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.
I don't know, I tend to close the door when I have to poop, I also don't want anyone to know that I just pooped when I poop.
Mark Shoutingdork said:
Your anonymity is preserved because we handle the query on your behalf. Don’t trust us? Erm, we have root. You do trust us with your data already. You trust us not to screw up on your machine with every update.
RMS said:
It's only micro when it's soft
I said:
INSTALL GENTOO, WIWA GAHNOO
:D
I happened to run a web search on one of the groups DDG gave a smaller donation to ($1000), "TechFreedom", and discovered that it's a corporate astroturf group funded by the Koch Brothers (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Koch_Family_Foundations, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/American_Future_Fund), which has campaigned hard against net neutrality:
http://techfreedom.org/post/156941339589/bipartisan-legislative-compromise-only-way-forward
This made me take a closer look at the rest of the list:
https://spreadprivacy.com/2017-donations-d6e4e4230b88#.wa26yv5ru
When you are finished looking at that list, would you publish what you find?
DDG has set a default search engine for Trisquel. If it has some unclear issues with privacy or something else then maybe it should be replaced with something else one, for example Startpage.
What Will Hill is posting is FUD, plain and simple. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by DDG.
@Opon4
Why don't you respect someone that has a different opinion than yours ?
instead of acusing him with an abreviation which is already a biased appraoch?
ie using a diminutive to potrait his opinion and repeating that too
Freedom of speach and opinion should ring a bell to you should it not ?
I'm not disrespecting anyone's freedom of speech by pointing out that FUD is FUD.
You are familiar with the term, yes? "Fear, uncertainty, and doubt". It's when no specific accusation is made, just vague, ominous suggestions. It's a tactic to avoid refutation and debate, to confuse and silence dissent. What Will Hill is saying about DDG is FUD (with the exception of the one specific accusation he made against DDG which I debunked).
I'm not sure there is a good replacement, but Trisquel should not promote Duck Duck Go over other search engines unless DDG is free software and people can prove it respects privacy. Because DDG passes on Bing and has hidden free software in the past, I never use it myself and would not recommend it to anyone. I would not make DDG a default search engine and would drop Bing as a choice.
https://duckduckgo.com/html/ and https://duckduckgo.com/lite are not software. They are pure HTML. And accessing the results of a search query is not Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS):
Services such as search engines collect data from around the web and let you examine it. Looking through their collection of data isn't your own computing in the usual sense—you didn't provide that collection—so using such a service to search the web is not SaaSS. However, using someone else's server to implement a search facility for your own site is SaaSS.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve
The server-side code being free or not has no consequence on the visitor's freedom (it has consequences on the service owner's freedoms, her business). And the user cannot know the code that really runs on the server-side. She has to trust the service provider. Or crawl the Web herself. Or collaboratively (Seeks/YaCy). But what a waste of energy! As in "more power plants" if most users start to crawl the Web themselves.
That's a good point, but surely you would prefer and recommend a search engine that used and shared free software, perhaps something that could be used cooperatively? If all other things were equal, we should alway prefer free software.
name at domain wrote:
> That's a good point, but surely you would prefer and recommend a search
> engine that used and shared free software, perhaps something that could be
> used cooperatively? If all other things were equal, we should alway prefer
> free software.
In the context of a search engine, we're talking about a service that does
not do your computing for you; this is not SaaSS (Service as a Software
Substitute). So whether that service uses free software is of interest to
that service's owners but not the users.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/network-services-arent-free-or-nonfree.html
discusses this.
That's a nicely written article, thanks.
When I say "use cooperatively" I mean that the software that you run cooperates with other people who use the same software to make a service that works. Media Goblin and Diaspora work this way, I think. If we had such a thing for search, surely it would be better than the monolithic search engines we have today.
Even though everything said by
Will Hill seems ridiculous.
There a few important points against DuckDuckgo
1.- Is non free and there are Libre options (like searx.me or YaCy) so there is no point in recommend it.
2.- DuckDuckgo is located on the USA a country with masive surveillance, even if duckduckgo does not stores data, it is in a country where services should be seen carefully. This is the reason why https://www.privacytools.io/ removed it from its list.
See here for the discussion where even DuckDuckgo's CEO could not provide more than his word ("you should trust us because we are trustable") https://github.com/privacytoolsIO/privacytools.io/issues/84
3.- Onpon4 said that duckduckgo.com hasn't done anything wrong. Which is as far as I know correct, yet, it is seen from the wrong perspective from my point of view. Trust shoul be earned. If duckduckgo really cares about users and privacy there is nothing stopping them to release their code and move their servers outside USA and stop using anti-privacy anti-freedom pro-monopolio amazon services.
A service that really cares about privacy does not go running into Amazon. Even if they encrypt everything.
Because the reality is "we don't know what duckduckgo really does" they claim don't store data they claim they don't send data to anyone but we can't know and personally I can't defend a promise.
Specially if there are real libre options.
> move their servers outside USA
This is a somewhat popular way that people attempt to protect themselves, but it actually makes it more likely that you're going to be snooped on for the most part. As weak as they are, the U.S. actually does have some restrictions on how they can perform surveillance on their own citizens which don't apply to foreign countries.
Ultimately, the only way you won't be vulnerable to snooping is if no data about you is being stored. But we can't verify that; even if DDG released server source code, we could not possibly verify that what was released is actually the code that runs on their server, or that it still will be tomorrow.
Jizz this thread's still alive?