DuckDuckGo is mostly a skin on Bing search results. By using it, you're saying you trust Microsoft more than Google. If that's your intent, cool, but you're not really getting away from the big tech companies by doing this.
Hardly. DuckDuckGo claims not to share my information or searches with Microsoft. I trust DuckDuckGo (not Microsoft) to keep their word.
The fact that DDG sources information about the internet from Microsoft is unimportant. I'm concerned about my personal information, not large scale manipulation of search results.
Meh, if DDG takes off MS will likely either cut them off or charge, leading to DDG needing to run their own search. If they can do that is unproven, and if running a web-wide search engine with DDG's business model is profitable is unproven too. I agree it's irrelevant to users medium-term, but if you're happy with DDG you kind of have to hope they don't become too successful.
I'm pretty sure DDG is already paying them. Maybe they'll raise their rates, but DDG has other sources and has their own crawler, too, so I think they will do just fine.
DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
I thought they just partner with Bing for ad results - not that their search was a skin of Bing. Wikipedia supports the ad partnership but also doesn't say anything about Bing being responsible for their search results. And on the few tests I've just done searching both, I see similar but not exact results. Do you have a source for this claim?
Duck Duck Go uses search result API's from various venders, including Bing- that is mentioned in the history section of the Wikipedia article. (Originally they used Yahoo's search API, and Yahoo of course changed to using results from Bing). They also have their own web crawler.
> But it brings users within an accidental click of sharing their bookmarks and browsing history with Google.
It's two clicks, you need to be really explicit about it. The first click opens a huge "You're about to turn on sync" dialog, where you have to click "Yes, I'm in" again.
I don't disagree with the general sentiment, but the article isn't factually correct. It's also by the same person who misunderstood the recent chrome changes and wrote a long blog post triggered by them misunderstanding what was going on (https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gyny83/google-chr...).
Could you tell me what claims in my post were incorrect? So far nobody at Google has disputed them, just pointed out that they don’t activate sync (which my blog post already stipulates.)
"Google developers claim this will not actually start synchronizing your data to Google — yet"
It sounds like you got up in arms because you thought that chrome now auto-syncs when you sign in to gmail, and wrote the blog post draft. Then you learned that this isn't the case but you kept your arms up anyway, added that unsubstantiated "- yet" and hit "publish" anyway, despite nothing really having changed.
(Disclaimer 1: I used to work for google, so I'm likely biased to give them more benefit of doubt.
Disclaimer 2: This is a shared HN account (the password isn't exactly hard to guess), so not all of its comments or posts are written by me.)
If you look up my Twitter account, you’ll see that I had a long discussion with multiple Chrome engineers days prior to writing the post, and there they explained the sync distinction to me. The post clearly explains the situation (mandatory login, but not sync) and articulates several reasons why I think it’s still an issue even if Google doesn’t auto-synchronize — a guarantee I don’t feel confident relying on in the future. In those various Twitter threads I also identified several problems with the Chrome privacy policy, which Google had to quickly update on a Sunday as a result.
Don't self-destruct. This may seem obvious, but surprisingly many people get this wrong. There will be moments where you have incomplete data on some situation, yet feel strongly about it, and have a strong urge to do some symbolical career-limiting step as a reaction -- for example, threatening to quit over some minor technical decision made by someone more senior that even turns out to be correct a few years down the line, or leaving a product that's on an exponential growth curve because you don't like to see the team changing as it grows (this is valid concern, but there's also significant upside to being an early member of a successful product). If you're in a situation like this, it's usually a good idea to wait a month or two before doing anything; usually the urge is over by then.
When things get their craziest, when entire teams are getting fired, that's sometimes when career opportunities open up and massive advancement can happen.
Who else is a company headquartered in the US that is willfully ignoring serious human rights concerns accountable to? This is exactly what government is for. And they certainly cared in 2007 when Yahoo was behaving similarly [0]. Hopefully Google doesn't want to become "moral pygmies".
All American companies operating in China, including all telecom companies, Apple, etc. are handing over all Chinese user info to the Chinese government.
As much as I think that's horrible, there are no laws in the US objecting to any of that.
There is a moral difference between providing information requested by government that already exists in the systems, and creating tools to assist in censoring information.
I would feel the same way if Google were to develop an additional surveillance tools in their products, such as e.g. recording all audio calls and/or giving government ability to remotely listen to smartphone's microphone.
> There is a moral difference between providing information requested by government that already exists in the systems, and creating tools to assist in censoring information.
Morals are personal values, so you should say "there is a moral difference for me between..."
> I would feel the same way if Google were to develop an additional surveillance tools in their products, such as e.g. recording all audio calls and/or giving government ability to remotely listen to smartphone's microphone.
What if the government mandated Google to do so, would you feel the same way?
The Chinese government mandated that Apple handed over all user data to it, and built all the backdoors to give the government access to it (stored by a government-controlled company). Is that different?
That was 11 years ago. All other big tech firms are doing business in China, by China's rules. Google used to be better than that. It's very sad that that's changing, but again it doesn't seem like something that's relevant for the House.
That's nice. Why bother questioning Google about an unreleased product when they can question any of the other big tech companies that _already_ do this?
Yep. And I don't know a way to get around shadow profiles.
We should try to find one. I fully support the privacy fixes people are proposing. I think that's really important. But it's pretty obvious that Facebook is winning right now.
However, the only thing that Facebook cares about is getting you to click on an ad. So even if you can't stop Facebook from getting a shadow profile on you, at least you can make that profile worthless by blocking ads literally everywhere that Facebook can think to display them to you, for you and your family/friends.
And you can be public about it to ensure that when Facebook goes to companies and says, "we have all this data for your next campaign", somebody in the sales-pitch meeting raises their hand and says, "yeah, but nobody looks at your ads."
The standard official Facebook response to this is that you do not own your "shadow profile" since it's a profile made out of data gathered from other people and companies, and thus they can not let you control it. In other words "it is not your data".
I doubt that holds in court, but as mentioned in the article, there are people in the EU who for months have tried to get Facebook to provide the shadow profile data on GDPR grounds, and Facebook has yet to allow it.
It seems like Facebook can afford to stall, they've got more knowledge and power than a single EU citizen can have, so I'm sure they know what they're doing.
----
To be honest, I think Facebook is in breach of _multiple_ GDPR articles _simultaneously_ here, which is quite a feat in itself.
They're in breach of:
- Privacy by Design (a.k.a. Privacy by Default)
- Right to Access
- Right to Be Forgotten (which is older than GDPR..?)
- Data Portability
Then again, Facebook is not alone. I'm pretty sure there are very, very few companies on the web that are not in breach of GDPR at least in spirit, if not in letter.
There's a zero chance that holds in court. If it were possible to have a negative chance it would have a negative chance of holding in court.
Data protection does not in any way relate to "ownership" of data.
If the data are personal data then you are forbidden from processing that data unless you have one of seven lawful bases enumerated in the GDPR, and where the data are sensitive then those bases are reduced further.
So this is an interesting scenario that I've seen people bring up before, but I've never been completely clear on the answer. Let's say I'm using an online virtual assistant with auto-replies and stuff like that, and I upload your contact information and phone number so it can help me manage my schedule/emails/etc...
Under GDPR, the company I just gave that information to doesn't have your permission. So, let's say that later on, you go to the company and say, "hey, delete any information about me." For them to comply, they can't keep on syncing your contact information in my address book, right?
I guess, how does GDPR handle a situation where a separate customer is going to Facebook and saying, "hey, let me put in that I'm X's cousin"? Should Facebook block that person from specifying the relationship in the UI? Or would that just fall under "essential for business"?
That doesn't make a difference. GDPR doesn't talk about data ownership it talks about data on persons. If it's data about me it's not allowed to hold it if there is no otherwise relationship.
"When Google acquired Boston Dynamics, it ended the company’s military contracts. Now that the company is owned by SoftBank, Mr. Raibert said, it could also return to military work."
I'm not saying its not useful. My daily work currently is VR development in Unity and so I'm using C# in Visual Studio with ReSharper which together give one of the best and most complete "basic code intelligence" experiences I know of. It's great and useful but while it makes me more efficient it just doesn't have much impact on the actual hard parts of programming. It improves the workflow for the routine parts but they are merely time consuming, not difficult/hard problems.
