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DuckDuckGo CEO: 'Google and Facebook Are Watching Our Every Move Online. It's Time To Make Them Stop' (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report from CNBC, written by Gabriel Weinberg, CEO and founder of DuckDuckGo: You may know that hidden trackers lurk on most websites you visit, soaking up your personal information. What you may not realize, though, is 76 percent of websites now contain hidden Google trackers, and 24 percent have hidden Facebook trackers, according to the Princeton Web Transparency & Accountability Project. The next highest is Twitter with 12 percent. It is likely that Google or Facebook are watching you on many sites you visit, in addition to tracking you when using their products. As a result, these two companies have amassed huge data profiles on each person, which can include your interests, purchases, search, browsing and location history, and much more. They then make your sensitive data profile available for invasive targeted advertising that can follow you around the Internet.
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So how do we move forward from here? Don't be fooled by claims of self-regulation, as any useful long-term reforms of Google and Facebook's data privacy practices fundamentally oppose their core business models: hyper-targeted advertising based on more and more intrusive personal surveillance. Change must come from the outside. Unfortunately, we've seen relatively little from Washington. Congress and federal agencies need to take a fresh look at what can be done to curb these data monopolies. They first need to demand more algorithmic and privacy policy transparency, so people can truly understand the extent of how their personal information is being collected, processed and used by these companies. Only then can informed consent be possible. They also need to legislate that people own their own data, enabling real opt-outs. Finally, they need to restrict how data can be combined including being more aggressive at blocking acquisitions that further consolidate data power, which will pave the way for more competition in digital advertising. Until we see such meaningful changes, consumers should vote with their feet.
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So how do we move forward from here? Don't be fooled by claims of self-regulation, as any useful long-term reforms of Google and Facebook's data privacy practices fundamentally oppose their core business models: hyper-targeted advertising based on more and more intrusive personal surveillance. Change must come from the outside. Unfortunately, we've seen relatively little from Washington. Congress and federal agencies need to take a fresh look at what can be done to curb these data monopolies. They first need to demand more algorithmic and privacy policy transparency, so people can truly understand the extent of how their personal information is being collected, processed and used by these companies. Only then can informed consent be possible. They also need to legislate that people own their own data, enabling real opt-outs. Finally, they need to restrict how data can be combined including being more aggressive at blocking acquisitions that further consolidate data power, which will pave the way for more competition in digital advertising. Until we see such meaningful changes, consumers should vote with their feet.
How do you move forward? Install a blocker and stop them from seeing your movements in the first place.
Install something like HTTP Switchboard or uMatrix, and block the request in the first place. Throw in Ghostery and a script blocker. Make javascript and cookies whitelist only. In my opinion, this should be the default behaviour of web browsers, but since most of the companies who make them are getting ad revenue, that likely won't happen.
In my estimation the average web set will have 5-10 3rd party sites which are nothing but trackers, ads, and analytics. It's none of their fucking business what sites I visit, so my browsers simply don't make requests to them.
Your ad revenue isn't my problem. Your business of tracking people isn't my problem. I haven't consented to the privacy policy of a 3rd party I didn't invite to the party. Your cookie policy? Well, I have one too, and the answer is no.
This won't work for the average web user because it takes time and effort and a willingness to break a website and decide it's not worth using. But until lawmakers clamp down on this, the only solution is to block it yourself and prevent these companies from seeing every site you visit.
Ad companies can suck my balls, because I'm simply going to keep blocking them. And the odd site I find which can't be made to run without the 3rd party crap? Well, there's always the back button and another site.
Please somebody use DuckDuckGo!!! Please please please.
Everybody knows their data is being slurped in exchange for free services, that's the deal, people are mostly ok with it. You're going to get ads, does it really matter if they're targeted or not?
Think of all the WiFi and Bluetooth IDs that are ubiquitous in our modern world. Wherever you go, your phone sees all these IDs.
Turn off your GPS location - it doesnt matter. Someone else's phone will detect your phone (by way of Bluetooth or WiFi IDs) and report it tagged with its own GPS location.
Buy a smart TV - it will note the presence of devices as well and (because of the giant data bucket all this is being fed into) know who's home it is in, what the GPS location is. And your phone will note the presence of your TV. It's a big web of device detection.
Correlate all this data, and you have a really, really detailed account of where you go, who you associate with, what you watch, and when. You can't really opt out unless you don't use any computerized gadgets because someone else's gadget will report your gadget for you.
Web browser tracking is just one piece of this giant data collecting puzzle but the rabbit hole goes a lot further...
The only way to get them to change is to force them to pay their users for the use of their data. Because the users' data is used for earning money, a large percentage of the profit should also go to the users.
-- Cheers!
Is DuckDuckGo a search engine per sei or would they just forward queries to Bing API and show results? The company is quite small -- their website mentions 40 employees (not all are programmers) -- so that would be quite impressive if they were able to built a search engine. Also, on job adverts they say that most of the codebase is written in the ancient language of Perl (which does not really sound like a language to write a search engine in).
I like the idea, but i'm more into filtering and blocking:
-Don't use social media: yes it's really possible within certain type of social circles
-Don't use ANY of google's software: Chrome, Android (as only deactivating Android Google Services makes Android Devices unusable)
-Use a real open browser with NoScript and AdBlock Ultimate. if something doesn't work then the hell with it. you'll get used to it.
-Facebook isn't internet. there's forums, chats, usergroups, email, and video sharing websites they didn't invent anything.
It also creates false successes to companies who are using overly disruptive, abusive or misleading ads.
I am sure many of you don't remember the Web in the late 1990's and early 2000's where Popup windows were common form of advertisements. Until the advent of the Popup blocker where the Ad companies realized they were no longer getting money from popups so they had to change their tactics to less obtrusive methods. Now every once in a while we get a re-insurgence of abusive ads, then ad blockers quickly are fixed to stop them.
I am OK with advertising, even targeted advertising on sites, especially sites who offer information and services that I like for free, and do not have other options for a business model. However if the Ad failed to get my attention, then it is the fault of the Ad. And if the Ad got in my way, that made me hate the company that is their fault too.
AdNauseam which tells the Ad Maker this ad worked. So lets do more of it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Unfortunately, whilst I do agree with the sentiment that the largest web monopolies such as Google and Facebook need to have their all-pervasive monitoring addressed, I do not believe that any change will come via meaningful government legislation.
The reason is simple. Today, governments around the world can turn up at the doorstep of Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others with a National Security Letter (NSL) and demand information in a way that the companies concerned are prohibited from discussing. In other words, it is in the interests of governments all around the world to allow these companies to become private extensions of the surveillance state. It's also much cheaper for the governments concerned - they can demand access by law - and at zero cost to them...
Unfortunately, that "cost angle" adds another twist, another dimension to this picture. In the case of the very largest providers concerned, governments know that the costs incurred from answering NSLs can soon become very, very expensive. Now, governments are not going to want to upset these companies to the point where they start to resist such demands [witness the Microsoft defense against the servers located in the Irish Republic], so said governments need to find a way to "sweeten" the deal. I have no knowledge of what they might be willing to do in such scenarios, but I am inclined to look at, for example, the case of Microsoft's purchase of both Skype and Hotmail.
When Microsoft made the purchases, these two companies were still in early growth stages and (IIRC) neither were operating at a profit. In the case of both acquisition, Microsoft then had to spend a very considerable sum of money to make changes. In the case of Skype, for instance, they changed the infrastructure model so that all calls, instead of being point-to-point, were re-routed via Microsoft's own internal servers, so Microsoft then had the potential [if required] to intercept and/or record Skype calls. So the question becomes: how do you make such a deal attractive to Microsoft?
Perhaps - again, I don't have any evidence of this - as a government you might be willing to strike a deal with respect to Corporation Tax? Or to award contracts? Or both? The point being that, ultimately, the relationship between these internet giants and the governments who are supposed to regulate them is already far too cozy for us to consider the relationship as "formal and polite"...
Add to this the truly massive amount of money and resource these companies can afford to spend on lobbying and you start to get an understanding of how unlikely meaningful government regulation can be. In fact, ironically, only the EU, which isn't a single government and which doesn't have the power to tax these corporations directly, seems to have been remotely successful in trying to curb their powers. And even their successes have been extremely limited.
Bottom line: ain't going to happen.
Can you elaborate on what was wrong with DuckDuckGo's results? I have been using it for years. Certainly it's very different from Google's results but to me that is a benefit -- I am fundamentally offended by a company trying to control what information I find based on 1) what the unwashed masses seem to want and 2) what Google's predictive analytics have determined is the best approach for their customers to attempt to separate me from my money. If I wanted to consume whatever slop was put in front of me by the corporations, I'd watch TV.
</rant> I know it's hard to characterize what counts as "better" search results, but I really would like to know what the usage model is where Google's results count as "good." Is it that you have a specific question in mind and you want to find an answer? Because my approach is totally different: I have a specific topic in mind and I want to see the range of what has been written about it so I can decide which source is the least stupid, biased, and evil.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Nope. Your fuzziness will stand out as a unique pattern. Such methods only work when everyone is using them.
And unless you have a crawler constantly roaming around random pages in the background, it doesn't fuzz your data at all. In fact it gives them an even more accurate picture of what sites you visit.
Yes - and we can set our technology to automate this for us.
Unfortunately, it is no longer enough. Our local ISPs - who are utterly corrupt - are not only selling details that connect us as individual households to our IP address leases, but also are using our billing records to join the dots to our postal location and home address...
If I try and access slashdot on my iPad, I notice that some of the served advertisements [those from Tamboola and others] are geographically specific to within 5 miles of my home address. I've discussed this with my ISP, who are presently trying to claim that they allocate IP blocks on a location-by-location basis. I'm presently trying to determine if this is the truth [which I doubt] and if not true this would go a long way to confirming my suspicions.
However, if your identity can be ascertained from the moment you connect, even a daily purge of your network access technology simply won't be enough.
Lastly, if you haven't already tried it, take a look at panopticlick, from the EFF, here:- https://panopticlick.eff.org/ It is a really effective way of determining whether or not your web browsing setup of choice can be used to track you based on nothing more than the configuration of the browser.
When the Cold War ended, the was an apocryphal story that a bunch of spies from the CIA and the KGB got together at a bar for drinks and to swap war stories. The CIA members lamented that due to the Soviet Union's closed society, their job had been so difficult. It was a major production just to get a single operative into the U.S.S.R. And how easy it must have been for the KGB to send agents into the U.S. to take photos of U.S. military assets at will.
The KGB members vehemently disagreed. They said that theirs had been the harder job. That while it was easy to get into the U.S., the free society produced so much information that it was difficult for them to pick out the signal from the noise. Every time the National Enquirer or some local newspaper printed a story about the U.S. government hiding a crashed UFO or someone with psychic powers or a plane invisible to radar, they had to use manpower to investigate if this was a real thing or just made-up BS.
Hiding stuff is hard. Making noise is easy. Why try to tackle the herculean task of trying to make yourself invisible to people spying on you, when you can just create the illusion of dozens of images of yourself, and leave the spies with the herculean task of trying to figure out which one is the real you? I've long advocated that the best way to fight browser tracking isn't to try to hide yourself. It's to pollute the data they're collecting about you. Someone needs to come up with a program or browser extension which when turned on follows random links on each page every few seconds (the extension can learn how long based on your actual browsing patterns), sometimes in new tabs, occasionally closing tabs, and occasionally going to google.com and searching random dictionary words to start the process over again.
Every time you step away from the computer, you can just turn that program on to pollute the data in the profile that Facebook, Google, et al have built up on you.