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DuckDuckGo: Illusion of Privacy

Posted by timothy on from the if-it-barks-like-a-duck dept.

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."

8 of 264 comments (clear)

  1. FTFA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    "The NSA Can't Loose" ... Really?

    1. Re:FTFA by rainmouse · · Score: 5, Informative
      For those that don't want to actually read the loose blog post (its just an opinion from some unknown guy and backed up with no actual facts by the way. It's not actually news at all).
      In the comments is a reply apparently from DuckDuckGo :

      "Hi, this is Gabriel Weinberg, CEO and founder of DuckDuckGo. I do not believe we can be compelled to store or siphon off user data to the NSA or anyone else. All the existing US laws are about turning over existing business records and not about compelling you change your business practices. In our case such an order would further force us to lie to consumers, which would put us in trouble with the FTC and irreparably hurt our business. We have not received any request like this, and do not expect to. We have spoken with many lawyers particularly skilled and experienced in this part of US and international law. If we were to receive such a request we believe as do these others it would be highly unconstitutional on many independent grounds, and there is plenty of legal precedent there. With CALEA in particular, search engines are exempt. There are many additional legal and technical inaccuracies in this article and I will not address all of them in this comment. All our front-end servers are hosted on Amazon not Verizon, for example."

  2. I didn't start using DuckDuckGo for privacy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I started using DuckDuckGo because, out of all the other search engines out there, it's the only one I've found whose entire mission statement centers around _not_ collecting information on every goddamn thing you do. Yes it's probably still being tapped at the fibre optic cable level so it doesn't really matter, that's not the point. The point is to vote with your dollar, or in this case your page view, far more influential these days than one thinks.

    I don't use DuckDuckGo because it preserves my privacy. I use DuckDuckGo because they don't try to take it away from me.

  3. Its not about 100% privacy by SuperCharlie · · Score: 5, Insightful

    At least for me its not, its about not feeding the beast directly. I jumped to Linux, Opera, and DDG as a way to add a few more cycles and maybe a few more man hours to the mess rather than hand it over directly with Windows, IE or Chrome, and Google. If anyone thinks they can really be anonymous in this ecosystem they are sorely mistaken. I do believe however there are less trodden paths and a little more pains in the rear that can be had, and as a silent protest, I chose to use them.

  4. Credibility? by karolgajewski · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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".

    --
    - .k. -
  5. DuckDuckGo Response by yegg · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hi, this is Gabriel Weinberg, CEO and founder of DuckDuckGo. I do not believe we can be compelled to store or siphon off user data to the NSA or anyone else. All the existing US laws are about turning over existing business records and not about compelling you change your business practices. In our case such an order would further force us to lie to consumers, which would put us in trouble with the FTC and irreparably hurt our business. We have not received any request like this, and do not expect to. We have spoken with many lawyers particularly skilled and experienced in this part of US and international law. If we were to receive such a request we believe as do these others it would be highly unconstitutional on many independent grounds, and there is plenty of legal precedent there. With CALEA in particular, search engines are exempt. There are many additional legal and technical inaccuracies in this article and I will not address all of them in this comment. All our front-end servers are hosted on Amazon not Verizon, for example. A couple other responses to things I've noticed in the comments already: --Our servers are already located around the world. European users are generally not hitting US-based servers, for example. --We do have PFS on our cert: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=duckduckgo.com&s=50.18.192.251

  6. Re:In Russia, Yandex searches YOU by Caetel · · Score: 5, Informative

    DDG shows no results. Bing's only result is this post. Google has this post and and OpenQNX forum post... so, Google, I guess?

  7. To hide the referrer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.