SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 5, Interesting) by darkfeline on Friday January 11 2019, @01:53AM (3 children)
HA! Let me laugh harder.
Do you guys even know who the founder of DDG is? Gabriel Weinberg. You know what his previous startup was? The Names Database. This was a website that aimed to connect people who had lost contact by gathering lots and lots of e-mail addresses. Getting access could be done by either paying money, or submitting lots of e-mail addresses of other people. Gabriel later sold the startup with all of the data for pure profit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_Database [wikipedia.org]
Did you seriously trust this guy to protect your privacy?
Anyone with a clue knew about this and shouted it from the rooftops from day one, but it got drowned out by the loud noise from the DuckDuckGo marketing cannonfire ("shills"). Probably got them banned from most forums. A quick Google search does nothing but does turn up a mysterious "Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe." Hmm, I wonder what that means. Certainly not that the GDPR was used to censor undesired facts about someone's proclivity to violating user privacy for profit.
So for those of you for which this is news: Surprise! If nothing else, at least Google is honest about what data it collects (and which so far hasn't been shown to be violated).
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 11 2019, @02:53AM
What that means is that you searched for something gogl's algorithm considers a person's name and they print that message by default now for all such queries.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 11 2019, @07:59AM (1 child)
Thanks, that certainly something to think about! Didn't know that.
I've been using ddg but I guess now I'll have to again evaluate other options. Any pointers? (Definitely not google.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 14 2019, @09:56AM
It's actually a metasearch engine. Like SoylentNews here, the individual sites can benefit from donations.
They act as an aggregator for google/bing/etc with a little subscript box indicating which site the result was from, usually. Additionally it supports archive.org for cached pages, and has proxy support, although I don't remember who it is through.
Point being, there is no central organization running it. It is open source and available to run yourself, and it provides all the major features and search capabilities of others (like searching for images, files, etc) without requiring any javascript at all, although it does have it available for real-time updates of certain option changes.
It has become my go to search engine for a lot of items, although you will sometimes see duplicates as you go through the search results, since it doesn't, as far as I know, cache the results and submits the queries each time you click to see the next page.