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Papas Fritas writes:
"There's an interesting read today by John Paul Titlow at FastCoLabs about DuckDuckGo, a search engine launched in 2008 that is now doing 4 million search queries per day and growing 200-500% annually. DuckDuckGo's secret weapon is hardcore privacy. When you do a search from DuckDuckGo's website or one of its mobile apps, it doesn't know who you are. There are no user accounts. Your IP address isn't logged by default. The site doesn't use search cookies to keep track of what you do over time or where else you go online.
'If you look at the logs of people's search sessions, they're the most personal thing on the Internet,' says founder Gabriel Weinberg. 'Unlike Facebook, where you choose what to post, with search you're typing in medical and financial problems and all sorts of other things. You're not thinking about the privacy implications of your search history.' DuckDuckGo's no-holds-barred approach to privacy gives the search engine a unique selling point as Google gobbles up more private user data. 'It was extreme at the time,' says Weinberg. 'And it still may be considered extreme by some people, but I think it's becoming less extreme nowadays. In the last year, it's become obvious why people don't want to be tracked.'"
(Score: 2) by h on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:00PM
Can we really trust them if they're situated in the USA? Can't the NSA just pull whatever they want from them?
Pardon my ignorance on the matter, I've not really kept up with all the Snowden Cypherpunk NSA battles etc
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jcd on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:09PM
Honestly, you can't really trust a packet that goes anywhere near the US. But at least DDG is a step in the right direction - away from the corporate overlords that want to hoover up every little detail about you to sell you MOAR STUFF.
"What good's an honest soldier if he can be ordered to behave like a terrorist?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @03:29PM
Then where can you trust your packets to go? Is it NSA == bad guys, everyone else == good guys? You're not one of those "USA is the Great Evil" guys and work that into all your comments are you? That pretty much ran me off of the other site and I shudder to think that cancer will be picked up here so soon, but your +5 mod suggests otherwise.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Angry Jesus on Friday February 21 2014, @12:41AM
Can't the NSA just pull whatever they want from them?
One of the benefits of not keeping records is that you never have to do the work ($$) of complying a subpoena (or national security letter) to hand over any records. That doesn't stop the NSA from recording all the traffic in and out of their site, but it does make retroactive fishing expeditions much harder. And if you are lucky the encryption on the traffic is enough to make it too expensive to decrypt in bulk making it useless for fishing expeditions too.
(Score: 5, Informative) by TheRaven on Friday February 21 2014, @08:58AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 5, Informative) by Angry Jesus on Friday February 21 2014, @11:51AM
One of the suspected methods of NSA interception is factory-compromised SSL front-ends that covertly expose their internal keys through not-so-random choices of various packet headers. That makes most high-traffic SSL sites potential targets of passive sniffing.
(Score: 4, Funny) by darinbob on Friday February 21 2014, @02:44AM
It's simple. Just search for bomb making supplies, then time how long it is until you get a knock on the door.