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DuckDuckGo Is Google's Tiniest Fiercest Competitor

posted by mattie_p on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:31PM   
from the tor-not-required dept.

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.'"

• Re:How do we know? Re:How do we know? (Score: 5, Insightful) by Angry Jesus on Friday February 21 2014, @12:41AM

  by Angry Jesus (182) on Friday February 21 2014, @12:41AM (#3914)

  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.

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• Re:How do we know? Re:How do we know? (Score: 5, Informative) by TheRaven on Friday February 21 2014, @08:58AM

  by TheRaven (270) on Friday February 21 2014, @08:58AM (#4172) Journal

  Note, however, that since the start DDG has used SSL by default. This means that the NSA can't passively intercept their traffic, as they've been able to do with a number of other sites. They have to explicitly intercept it. If you're really paranoid, certificate transparency will protect you from that (when it's finally deployed, probably later this year in some form or other...), but I think once you get to the stage where the NSA is actively watching you, rather than just passively sniffing traffic that happens to contain your data, you're likely to be under physical surveillance quite soon (if not already), so it's less of an issue.

  --
  sudo mod me up

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  • Re:How do we know? (Score: 5, Informative) by Angry Jesus on Friday February 21 2014, @11:51AM

    by Angry Jesus (182) on Friday February 21 2014, @11:51AM (#4247)

    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.

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