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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: 5, Insightful) by duvel on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:04PM
This is actually something for which we have to thank the NSA and Facebook.
If it wasn't for them, people wouldn't worry nearly as much about their privacy. Increased usage of anonymous search engines, of Tor, of VPN's: it all comes from the valiant efforts of NSA, Facebook and the like to let everybody understand the value of privacy.
And let's not forget the efforts of the music industry. In Europe, the lobbying of the music industry has gotten legislators to the point where they have made accessing torrent websites illegal (never mind that those sites don't contain any 'illegal' content themselves). This is enforced by altering DNS. Every visit to a torrent web site is diverted to a page warning about the illegal activity you're embarking on. Thanks to this, I have started using Tor.
It's all good.
This Sig is under surveilance by the NSA