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DuckDuckGo: Illusion of Privacy
An anonymous reader writes "With all of the news stories about users moving to DuckDuckGo because of NSA spying, this article discusses why the privacy provided by DuckDuckGo is more the privacy from third-party tracking (advertisers) but may do little, if anything, to prevent the NSA from tracking your searches."
I may be breaking the fundamental rules of Slashdot, but ...
- the "article" is a single post on a recently created blog
- they misspell "lose"
- a quick google of Brett Wooldrige doesn't bring up anything exciting (a Forbes blog account with no content?)
This is the very definition of "nothing to see here, move along".
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Is it any safer? They bill themselves as "the world's most private search engine" but that doesn't really mean anything.
It's about as good as a google search and it gives the wikipedia article for any topic at the top. My opinion is better than your opinion.
I think the article brings up and interesting point about who's SSL certs the NSA has access to. It's reasonable to assume that they are capturing most if not all Internet traffic in the states (at the very least all packets entering or leaving the county.) What is unknown is how much of that encrypted traffic can be easily decrypted. If I were a three letter gov't agency intent on decrypting massive amounts of traffic, I would go straight for the keys. It's particularly of note that DuckDuckGo does NOT use session keys in its SSL implementation, meaning if their private key got compromised, all previous searches would also be compromised. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to assume that the NSA has found a way to that key, either through secret court orders, or good old fashioned nefarious means. Especially for a site like DDG, who makes promises of "privacy". Makes you wonder who else's keys they have access to.
When was the last time you searched for something and found it using a commercial search engine? I've never, ever found anything on search engines. I have my bookmark library (entirely non-cloud) and ask HUMAN BEINGS for recommendations when I need a new kind of software. Then I might use the search engine to find their site the first time, but that's hardly blindly searching for stuff. I always just find 100% spam, irrelevant crap and generally low-grade junk when I search for *anything*. The entire concept of searching for things in general (not counting service-specific engines) is foreign to me. It just doesn't work in my world. I don't understand what people search for that they get proper results. Or maybe they just have extremely low demands.
Thanks, that was a nice official response to a crackpot article that should never have made it to slashdot.
My read of that article was that nothing is really safe (which is true, but you have to be reasonable about these things) and that larger companies at least have accountability. It kindly forgets that this accountability isn't to users, it's to shareholders. DuckDuckGo protects against these larger companies, and DDG might just fly low enough under the radar to avoid the attention of the NSA.
Keep up the good work, Gabe. If you're in the SF area, I'd love to buy you a beer.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
To strip off the referrer. Otherwise the end site would see the URL of the DuckDuckGo search revealing the details of the search, page, etc.
Name me another major web search engine with an official Tor onion endpoint. DDG is the only one I know.
https://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/
https://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.tor2web.org/
Not living in either country, both the US and Russia are foreign competitors with a shady track record on business ethics and human rights and politics, so it really doesn't make a difference to me. Both nations have wasted a decade bombing Afghanistan, you're both prosecuting dissidents. I have serious trouble telling you guys apart.