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DuckDuckGo Denies Using Fingerprinting To Track Its Users (betanews.com)
Mark Wilson writes: Responding to a forum post that accused it of 'fingerprinting users', privacy-centric search engine DuckDuckGo says that fears are unfounded and that it is not tracking its users. The allegation was made after the Firefox extension CanvasBlocker showed a warning to users. The suggestion of fingerprinting -- gathering as much information as possible about a user through their browser to create a unique identifier that can be used for tracking -- is clearly something that would seem to sit in opposition to what DuckDuckGo claims to stand for. The company CEO says the accusation is simply wrong.
Because of the aforementioned not-tracking stuff? And the results are as good as Google, which is apparently a non-goofy name now?
If you care about your privacy then you use DuckDuckGo.
So, one guy on posts on a forum a certain API is being blocked by his Firefox extension CanvasBlocker. Not that the one individual has anything showing some tracking and data gathering, he just sees an API being used. Without any real evidence what so ever. Sounds like someone wants to sow seeds of mistrust at DuckDuckGo.
The problem with DuckDuckGo is that, when it comes to searching, it simply sucks. I used it as my default search engine for a week, and I had to return to Google - the results from DuckDuckGo were very mediocre. Which is a shame, for I am really sick and tired of the Google bastards (Don't Be Evil? Assholes!) but DuckDuckGo will have to improve a heck of a lot before that quality of its search results is comparable to Google's.
Because of the aforementioned not-tracking stuff? And the results are as good as Google.
In my experience they are not. Not even close. I wish I could ditch Google, but DuckDuckGo cannot (yet) fill Google's search shoes.
Support Duckduckgo.com. I've been using it for years and have seen the amount of spam in my inbox and even social media go WAY down. We need more services like Duckduckgo.com, not fewer.
But, perhaps the inevitable attack on them is showing some success. I'm hopeful.
is something that should be disabled (by default).
It's not a feature that can be switched off. Fingerprinting works by collecting as many attributes about the host browser as possible. This might be things like your language, browser version, installed plugins, settings, IP address, and many other things. Most of these have potential legit uses, but when combined they build a "fingerprint" of you.
I suppose you could disable collection of some of the fingerprint components. This is however contradictory to a world where we want web apps to have the same power as "native" apps. Either web apsp are more secure than native apps, or as powerful as native apps. It's not both.
Cool site that can show the details of your browser fingerprint:
https://amiunique.org/
They still index torrent sites while google keeps shuffling them further down the listings.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
How about Qwant? Anyone have any yea/nay votes for that as an alternative?
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Google search has become useless for me (search tech related issues) - too many sponsored ads and content farms.
Duck Duck go doesn't have all the advertising, and I am getting useful results when searching for issues.
The difference is that while some other services show ads based on interests inferred from your previous viewing history, DuckDuckGo shows ads based only on the context of your search query. DuckDuckGo also adds its referral tag to Amazon product URLs in search results.
(Source: "How Does DuckDuckGo Make Money? DuckDuckGo Business Model Explained")
It maybe, but does not need to be a tracking attempt. It should be conclusively explained and removed.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You are not paying for their service. Therefore, you are not the customer. You are the product.
Ok, but only in the sense of being exposed to ads. If that makes me the product, then I know about the extents and times when I am said product and can make an informed choice.
They are no different than facebook or any other 'free' thing.
Facebook, by design, is a privacy-invading/selling ethics-free piece of shit. They sell all kinds of thing about you to people behind your back, make inferences about you that you have no idea of (and in many cases are not supportable, yet are packaged as "truths" to the buyers), and would deprive you of oxygen if they could think of a way to do so for profit. Being "free" does NOT make everything equivalent, and if your post was earnest then frankly I'm embarrassed on your behalf that you would see such a grand equivalency... wake up.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
If you use !sp instead, you can use Startpage, which anonymizes Google search results.
huh? Googles boolean qualifiers havent worked in literally years
"His name was James Damore."
Duckduckgo doesn't do their own web indexing. They purchase web indexing from many sources. Most of Duckduckgo's results are actually purchased through Bing, some is from Google. Many smaller search engines purchase and offer search results from larger entities. The fact that Google, Bing, or anyone else is selling them raw data doesn't mean that Duckduckgo is collecting information for them. None of what you are searching for makes it to Google or Bing that way.
A bang, of which "!g" is just one (!w for wikipedia, !r is reddit, etc) is something different. It's just a quick way of getting results directly from somewhere else - a way that you can have Duckduckgo as your home page but get quick results from other places directly. Of course, when you use one and are redirected, you have no guarantees what the target site is doing with that search data. But if you are coming up dry with the results from Duckduckgo, then !g is one way to try the query to see what Google makes of it.
My personal assessment of Duckduckgo is this. I use it directly for about 95% of my search, and for normal to moderately difficult queries, it works great. For more advanced searches, searches where there might be less signal and more noise (searches with key words that are common jargon but in the context of the search it's not the jargon I'm looking for), then I do find that Google is slightly superior at parsing the search and returning what I want to see. At times like that, when getting the result is more important to me than watching my privacy, then I'll use a !g and try Google if I come up dry on Duckduckgo. Though I find that Duckduckgo is getting better, and there have even been cases where I've gone directly to Google with something I didn't expect would work well on DDG and where I came up dry there and where DDG found me what I wanted.
Just because Google documents it that way doesn't mean it actually works. I just searched for "ibanez and rb-800", and it wasn't until the third result that it actually matched.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
... and the results are, today, good as google searches - no tracking bullshit on all links (it's why I avoid using Gmail without a IMAP client too)
A browser needs to know it to render properly. A website serving it certainly doesn't. And I have no idea why it would.
Why would it? And why would a website? Why would Slashdot? Or (choose a news site)? Or Reddit?
Certainly not. Unlike timezone where a webapp might need to know it, knowing time isn't something that should be communicated client-to-server ever.
This is the only time you actually suggested a use case for the data you're collecting. That said, why does it need to get reported back to the server. The whole point you're making is that the site can display it on its own. So, again, it wouldn't be usable for fingerprinting if it stayed clientside
Again, NOT an exhaustive list. I can keep going.
Instead of just listing features, you should explain what benefit I get out of letting that data leak out of my browser. Cause I don't see it.
Whoa. First, I would think 2002 would be far enough back. Second, the cool stuff that happened since then are things like embedded video/audio. Or CSS advances. I'm not sure what cool stuff's been enabled by new tech since then, rather than faster pipes and the smartphone form-factor.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
>"In my experience they are not. Not even close. I wish I could ditch Google"
You can. Just use:
https://startpage.com/
and get the same Google results but without the tracking.
https://duck.co/help/results/sources
"In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing."
I don't trust Google with 100% of my search traffic. I prefer to keep them as a secondary resource - I don't trust that startpage.com can have zero tracking by Google and here's why. About 75% of web sites have some sort of traffic monitoring aid or ad source that relates in some way back to Google. However Startpage.com munges Google's results, when I click on one of their links and end up on a page that has any Google presence, Google knows two things. It knows that it served up search results through Startpage.com that included that page I clicked on, it may know the referrer information (depending on how deeply Google's hooks are into that site), but it certainly knows that I ended up on that site and what my IP address is. It's not a stretch for Google's servers to piece together the exact search that took you there from start to finish. Given that it's Google's bread and butter to do this, I think it's a stretch to think they don't. So if I end up on one of the 75% of web sites where Google has some presence, then I might as well have gone to google.com and typed in the search there, since they will know just as much about me.
Using startpage as my secondary resource rather than Google is a possibility. I'll have to give that some thought. It will never be my primary search choice, though.
That's not the right syntax for Google, hasn't been for years. The syntax is now that double quotes mean the search term must appear on the page for it to be included in the results. So double quotes are like a logical AND, everything else is logical OR but obviously heavily weighted.
You correct search term should be:
"ibanez" "rb-800"
First result looks correct but I don't know much about guitars.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC