Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Is this for real? DuckDuckGo has grown in popularity primarily on its claim: We don't track you. Is this no longer true?
DuckDuckGo now fingerprinting visitors
DuckDuckGo is using the Canvas DOMRect API on their search engine. Canvas is used to make unique geometry measurements on target browsers, and DOMRect API uses rectangles. This can be verified with the CanvasBlocker Firefox add-on by Korbinian Kapsner. DDG has recently been redirecting some website navigations to cute pictures with remarks about their privacy promises. The organization is now seeking to expand their Internet presence. DDG are without question data brokers, and commercial websites that make promises like DDG does will not survive for long if they actually keep them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 10 2019, @05:53PM (2 children)
Just checked and hovered the mouse cursor over some links on a random search on google. It's still showing the links are to google though. Maybe it's a recent firefox bug (or "feature") that's doing that as I'm on firefox 63 currently.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday January 10 2019, @07:29PM
I'm using Firefox 64. I wonder if it's the JavaScript. I am not using NoScript, and I can certainly believe Google serving up a heavily JavaScripted page if it detects that you allow it, and a plain HTML page if you block scripts. And if it is JavaScript, probably it can set the hover text to anything it wants. One other clue I noticed is that there is no "https://" at the start of the hover text that a Google search presents to the user.
Now, how much time do I want to spend on further investigation? Lot of other things to do....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 10 2019, @09:50PM
I thought it was well-known that Google includes javascript that will activate on mousedown on the link, which will then change it to the tracking url.