Bing Contract Prohibits DuckDuckGo From Completely Blocking Microsoft Tracking (reviewgeek.com) 70
DuckDuckGo isn't as private as you thought. "Due to a confidential search agreement, the DuckDuckGo browser does not block all Microsoft trackers," reports Review Geek. "What's worse, DuckDuckGo only acknowledged this 'privacy hole' after it was discovered by a security researcher." From the report: Security researcher @thezedwards found that the mobile DuckDuckGo browser does not block Microsoft trackers on third-party websites, such as the Facebook-owned Workplace.com. Gabriel Weinberg, the CEO of DuckDuckGo, is now running damage control on Twitter. He explains that Microsoft cannot see what you search in DuckDuckGo, and the DuckDuckGo browser blocks all Microsoft cookies. But if you visit a website that contains Microsoft's trackers, then your data is exposed to services like Bing and LinkedIn. This is the result of DuckDuckGo's "search syndication agreement" with Microsoft. In order to pull search information from Bing, the privacy experts at DuckDuckGo have to poke holes in their browser's security system.
While DuckDuckGo has a solid privacy policy when it comes to Microsoft's ads, it hasn't explained how Microsoft uses data from third-party trackers. And that's quite alarming. Maybe this situation is overblown, or maybe Microsoft can build targeted ad profiles based on your web activity in DuckDuckGo -- we don't know because DuckDuckGo signed a confidentiality agreement. Gabriel Weinberg says that DuckDuckGo is "working tirelessly behind the scenes" to improve its deal with Microsoft. Additionally, he expects DuckDuckGo to "include more third-party Microsoft protection" in a future update.
While DuckDuckGo has a solid privacy policy when it comes to Microsoft's ads, it hasn't explained how Microsoft uses data from third-party trackers. And that's quite alarming. Maybe this situation is overblown, or maybe Microsoft can build targeted ad profiles based on your web activity in DuckDuckGo -- we don't know because DuckDuckGo signed a confidentiality agreement. Gabriel Weinberg says that DuckDuckGo is "working tirelessly behind the scenes" to improve its deal with Microsoft. Additionally, he expects DuckDuckGo to "include more third-party Microsoft protection" in a future update.
Typical. (Score:5, Insightful)
That this happened is unsurprising. That they kept it a secret is unforgivable.
What OTHER secret ways might there be in which they are selling us out? If they insist that there are no other ways, why would we believe them, now that they have been caught lying to us already?
I use FIrefox and have it configured to clear all cookies every time it closes (and I have disabled Pocket). It's still not perfect privacy, but it is a lot better than doing nothing at all.
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Well, there is likely other things too. The problem is the fact that the actual search data is very hard to gather and thus require a lot of money, so having a totally privacy oriented search without any ties to the big search engines is not really viable. And such ties always come with strings to use a bad pun..
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"A front-end for" translates to me as "everything but the presentation is Bing", and it is not described like that.
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It 'gathers information from 400 sources' (or something inane like that), but realistically 98% (Pick a random really high number) of all results come from Bing.
Re:Typical. (Score:5, Informative)
The article is talking about the DuckDuckGo browser, not the search engine.
Re: Typical. (Score:2)
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So what is the alternative? Bing is out, obviously, but so is Google.
Is WebCrawler still around? HotBot? Altavista? A custom search on your personal AngelFire webpage powered by the ZapZoneNetwork?
Maybe I'll head down to the local book store to see if they have an updated copy of the Internet Yellow Pages [paperbackswap.com]...
Re:Typical. (Score:4, Interesting)
This isn't DuckDuckGo the search engine, this is their browser which is Chromium based. It has some built in enhanced privacy protections beyond what Chromium offers, but they deliberately exclude Microsoft trackers.
My advice would be to use either Chrom(e|ium) or Firefox, and load up on add-ons that protect your privacy. CookieAutoDelete, uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, Privacy Possom, and Decentraleyes are a good set-up. That will block everything, Microsoft, Google, all of them.
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Check out CookieAutoDelete. Rather than just clearing cookies when you close the browser, it clears them a few seconds after you navigate away from the website or close the tab. It also clears out all the other crap like site local storage and cache.
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Collecting information while not telling the user is the entire point. That IS the free digital service business model.
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What OTHER secret ways might there be in which they are selling us out?
They've been selling you out since the start, appending their affiliate ID onto search results so they get a commission from Amazon et al for every purchase you make ... something that's buried in their T&C but strangely never promoted as "a feature" because they were constantly banging on about privacy and tracking. Now that's up the chute, they're basically a wrapper around BING that monetise your purchases, and basically not a lot else.
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That this happened is unsurprising. That they kept it a secret is unforgivable.
What OTHER secret ways might there be in which they are selling us out? If they insist that there are no other ways, why would we believe them, now that they have been caught lying to us already?
I use FIrefox and have it configured to clear all cookies every time it closes (and I have disabled Pocket). It's still not perfect privacy, but it is a lot better than doing nothing at all.
I only speak in between html tags
Feels like a hit piece (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Feels like a hit piece (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Feels like a hit piece (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure does feel like a hit piece. Though my usual blockers in Firefox (NoScript, Privacy Badger, DDG extension) don't toss up much at the DDG search page. And to their credit, if I leave NoScript blocking their site, they still have a usable no-scripts results page (unlike Big G or Big M).
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It's an important point. DDG used other search engines to provide their search results. Microsoft requires them not to block their trackers on 3rd party sites. For reasons only known to DDG, they decided that that was a price worth paying to keep using Bing's search results, which are frankly crap. What's worse is that they didn't make it clear that their privacy-enhancing browser with built-in tracker protection had an exemption carved out for Microsoft, greatly undermining its utility and trustworthyness.
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The headline and opening paragraph of the summary are pretty inaccurate and make this feel like a hit piece, sponsored by Google.
Wow, 19 minutes from post to blaming google.
So how much did google have to pay Gabriel Weinberg, DDG's CEO, to openly admit his browser blocks all third party trackers except for Microsofts?
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To be fair, blaming Google is usually a strong opening move. You'd be right more often than not.
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ddg is advertising that they can block tracking by ANY app in your phone.
i do usability testing and i frequently (almost weekly) rate their ads. if they are doing damage control and they are looking to improve their contract and have a confidentiality agreement, you know something is up.
not that i would ever use ddg as bing is terrible for searches anyway
So what. Search is dead. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not even sure what killed it, but search is dead. Google used to be the best way to recall my old Slashdot posts. Now I can barely find a hand full from the last couple years. All the big search engines like that. The long tail of obscure corners of forgotten spider-web infested dank goth basement cheeto beer breath sites that used to make the Internet interesting has been un-linked from search. Dead.
You might as well just search Wiki, reddit, and a few other things now. AFAIK you can't keyword search the Wayback Machine. We'd need something like that to make search what it was until just a couple years ago.
99% of all hits returned from search now are just hot ad-infested garbage that wants you to page through dozens of auto-playing videos arbitrated by 30 or more 3rd party JavaScripts loading 50 megs of potentially malware laden garbage, in the vain hope of getting the 142 bytes of text that would supply you the answer.
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I kinda pine for the days we could browse the web, somewhat effectively, with links/lynx. We all couldn't wait for the future of having all the information we could ever want at our fingertips and turns out, you won't believe #7.
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Most news sites work fine. Opening in w3m is often an effective way to bypass a paywall
Basically, anything with text as the main focus and not a huge amount of JS will work fine, and it's often ea
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I have two recommendations.
First check out https://millionshort.com/ [millionshort.com], it is a search that excludes the "top" sites. I've found this incredibly helpful in find the "obscure corners".
Also, I've been a beta user of Kagi, a currently-beta but planned to be paid search service. I've been so happy with it in beta that if their pricing isn't insane, I will be paying for it when it leaves beta: https://kagi.com/ [kagi.com]
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Isn't the obvious problem with Kagi going to be that if you are a paying customer, then Kagi has all your search data?
You identify yourself every time you log in and use the service. So how can this be anonymous?
The concept of paying so that they do not need to monetize your data is certainly an attractive one, but in the end surely all that is happening with this is that you have to trust Kagi with that data? Or trust Kagi not to collect and store it?
Dunno...
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The patent comment was complaining about not being able to find things. Not privacy.
Re: So what. Search is dead. (Score:2)
The race to the bottom has been going on with all major search engines, and it seems they really amped up their 'game' within the past month. It's like a return to "best of the web" only far more insidious.
My wish is to see a replacement come along that is at least as good as the Google of old, but coincidently I also wish for a leprechaun and a pegasus.
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Now there's an internet anachronism... I guess we're getting old enough to have a few.
The "Webring". Boy that brings back the memories... Wow.
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Google used to be the best way to recall my old Slashdot posts. Now I can barely find a hand full from the last couple years.
I binged a random sentence of your post on google "Now I can barely find a hand full from the last couple years." (In quotes, of course.) Google returned a single result, which was this page with your post.
The same was true when I searched for another random sentence: "AFAIK you can't keyword search the Wayback Machine."
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Try finding some of old posts based on partly remembered content. As an example, I remember an old post from maybe 15+ years ago that was talking about how electricity would become intermittent as we transitioned to renewables.
It should be possible to find it. You can do things like narrow the timeframe with Google. It's very hard to do though, not least because Slashdot seems almost designed to be difficult to search. The default pages it presents to web crawlers don't show all posts, for example.
It's not
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To be fair, the amount of information on the web that is indexed has exploded. One table said in 2008 there were just under 70 million active websites (for some definition of active) and just under 160,000,000 total websites. Now there are almost 200,000,000 active with over 1 billion total. That anything at all can be found that is useful is a testament to the job they are doing.
There is still a lot of ad infested garbage, but that has always been true. Browsers have also gotten better at either incorpora
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I'm not even sure what killed it, but search is dead. Google used to be the best way to recall my old Slashdot posts. Now I can barely find a hand full from the last couple years. All the big search engines like that. The long tail of obscure corners of forgotten spider-web infested dank goth basement cheeto beer breath sites that used to make the Internet interesting has been un-linked from search. Dead.
You might as well just search Wiki, reddit, and a few other things now. AFAIK you can't keyword search the Wayback Machine. We'd need something like that to make search what it was until just a couple years ago.
99% of all hits returned from search now are just hot ad-infested garbage that wants you to page through dozens of auto-playing videos arbitrated by 30 or more 3rd party JavaScripts loading 50 megs of potentially malware laden garbage, in the vain hope of getting the 142 bytes of text that would supply you the answer.
You don't know how to use Google correctly anymore, then. You're thinking its 2005. Google is still as powerful as ever. https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com] Just search by dates, add a before:2017-01-01 after:2006-03-03 It is just now more useful to more people with the main results that nerds like us on Slashdot try to think we should get.
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You severely underestimate the number of times I've posted here, LOL. I got less than 400 results from that link. Also, when I date-ranged it to 2001, my immediate reaction to the 9/11 attacks is missing. Some of my Slashdot stuff seems to have come back from the worst, but a lot is still missing. I maintain that I'm doing nothing wrong. Google is still b0rked.
I'm pretty sure I used the word "kamikaze" in that post. Searching for istartedi+kamikaze doesn't return any hits, for any time (and yes, I mad
OK, here's the challenge. (Score:2)
Here is my emotional reaction to 9/11 [slashdot.org] shortly after it happened. For the record, I'm not really all that proud of it. It's a bit cringe actually; but it's in the archives. It's part of the historical record. It drew some responses.
"Kamikaze Can't Win by istartedi (Score:2)" plainly appears in the archived story. It should be a no-brainer for Google to find that; but it doesn't find it for me. I had to use Slashdot's archive links which I don't think allow search by userid, but for something like this
DDG says they don't track you (Score:2)
They never claimed their downstream providers don't track you. Caveat emptor.
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DuckDuckGo isn't as private as you thought. (Score:4, Insightful)
The stated issue is third-party trackers (Score:3)
So basically this is really only a Chrome issue right? Safari certainly prevents third-party scripts from running by default, and I believe Firefox does the same thing (if that's not the default, it certainly does with uBlock Origin installed).
While I'm tempted to make a snarky comment about how MS is just buying a piece of what Google gets for free, DuckDuckGo really should have been more transparent about this. But it won't stop me from continuing to use them (with my non-Chrome browser).
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If you can't trust DuckDuckGo to block third party trackers--a company that staked its very business on blocking third-party trackers--why do you think you can trust Apple and Mozilla?
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To the best of my knowledge, DuckDuckGo has never claimed to block third-party cookies. They say they don't track your searches and tie them to you - which is rather different and somewhat narrow.
Their specific statement is: "We don’t store your personal information. Ever. Our privacy policy is simple: we don’t collect or share any of your personal information."
Duck Duck Go was never better. (Score:1)
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DuckDuckGo was, maybe still is, better than Google at returning relevant search results. About 10 years ago I was trying to find data sheets (pinouts and timing information for reading, mostly) for the ROMs used by HP 264X terminals, and what Google kept giving me was links that promised data sheet PDFs but really were pages demanding that I request a quote for the parts from whatever outfit had them up. Given that these were mask-programmed ROMs and AMD would supply them I really didn't think these outfit
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It's wabbit season (Score:2)
The privacy search engine (Score:2)
That offers complete privacy, with a couple of little exceptions.
On a side note, I am selling my car. It's complete. Complete. Missing a spark plug and a wheel but Complete.
Did you really believe them? (Score:2)
1/ Big data money - stealing and monetizing people's data - is more addictive to tech companies than crack is to a crackhead. Why would DDG resist the lure any better than all the others - and more importantly, why would they choose to do so?
2/ DDG uses Bing. Did you really think Microsoft told them "Sure, go ahead! Use our stuff for free and take marketshare from us!"
3/ DDG is free. You're the product when you're not paying anything. Actually, in this day and age, you're the product even when you're paying
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Yeah probably. But what can you do? In this age of privacy fuckery, there's not much you can do to escape the corporate surveillance.
The World Is a Ghetto (Score:1)
And I see none of these ads, not ever, not any where, not any time. So, the world is a ghetto? For you? Not for me!
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I'm the same. I never see any ads. But are you really comfortable with whatever other use various corporations and governments may find for whatever DuckDuckGo has been serving up when you thought you were at least a bit protected from the relentless surveillance?
Time to check out (Score:2)
brave search.
This is good to know (Score:2)
For my search needs on multiple computers/operating systems and cell phones, I have now replaced DuckDuckGo with Startpage. Maybe I'll give them another chance when they provide unassailable proof that they aren't ratting me out to Microsoft or anybody else, but I doubt it. They have been intentionally deceptive about their main selling point: privacy. Why would I trust them again when I'd have to run any privacy guarantees they gave past a lawyer? They're just not worth the time or trouble.
What really
Use DDG as a search engine, not as a browser (Score:1)
Just set your favorite browser to use DDG as the default search engine, and use that for search. Problem solved.
I used to have the DDG Android app installed, but at some point it started insisting that it open search results in its own built-in browser. WTF? I already have a browser on my device (Vivaldi), set up exactly the way I want it to. Why on earth would I want another one? The Bing search app makes the same mistake, so it's not usable, either. At least that one let's you easily switch to seeing a pa
What about these? (Score:2)
What about:
startpage?
metager?
That's it for DuckDuckGo (Score:2)
Who is surprised? (Score:2)
If you are you haven't been paying attention . . .
This here pot looks rather like that nearby Kettle (Score:2)
Says the person using Microsoft Windows.