Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

https://medium.com/@yegg/privacy-is-at-a-crossroads-choose-wisely-96bac0644ec1

by edward • 11 years ago

299 164 11 years ago

I've also noticed the quality of DuckDuckGo search results has been steadily improving, especially over the past year. I would encourage anyone who tried it and went back to another search engine to consider giving DuckDuckGo another shot--you may be pleasantly surprised!

bsbechtel• 11 years ago

Agreed. By using them more often, you're only going to help them improve.

antr• 11 years ago

I just read Gabriel's post, and I pretty much agree (and do) with what he says. Due to these shared believes I've been using DDG quite a bit, I even deleted the Google search app from my phone, and instead been using DDG's iOS app as my default mobile search engine.

However, every time I use DDG it hurts a bit. The quality of the results are very far behind from that of Google's. I many times end up doing a Google search in incognito mode because DDG just doesn't cut it. I hope DDG improves, because I haven't seen that improvement during the past year.

yegg• 11 years ago

Specific examples you're willing to share really help us improve. Feel free to send them to us at inbound at duckduckgo.

hackuser5• 11 years ago

many times end up doing a Google search in incognito mode because DDG just doesn't cut it

The sample is only searches where DDG fails; inevitably, every other search engine will provide better results.

(That doesn't mean DDG is better or worse than Google; it only means that this methodology doesn't provide infromation on that topic.)

waffl• 11 years ago

I'm just curious if when you say incognito mode that you are using Chrome? I am assuming that changing the default search engine from Google avoids sending partially typed searches to Google, and the privacy policy seems to state that limited personally identifying data is still transmitted but I'm still somehow a bit wary of chrome. Is it fairly substantiated that other than having a different search engine and not signing in, that chrome behaves in a trustworthy fashion? There is still the odd translation suggestion and double click definition that I suppose would also have to be turned off. (From their privacy policy they claim no identifying data is sent along with these requests but the IP alone is an obvious identifier)

sroerick3• 11 years ago

I find the "!g" to perform an anonymous Google search works great, and has very little added effort.

shit_parade2• 11 years ago

I also recommend people try startpage.com

Sami_Lehtinen• 11 years ago

+1, Starpage uses Google's search index and DDG uses Bing's. Yet it seems that Google is delivering clearly weakened search results for them?

smhenderson• 11 years ago

While also not as good as google from a result standpoint I have been using ixquick.com for several years now and have seen a steady improvement in it's results as well.

They claim to be "the world's most private search engine: https://ixquick.com/eng/protect-privacy.html?

Aoyagi3• 11 years ago

Actually, I've noticed that DGG is way overdoing guessing. More often than not I get results that are only similar to the search query in some way instead of actually what I'm looking for. This has been getting worse over time for me.

username223• 11 years ago

Both DDG and Google hatefully over-guess. I understand their motivation -- people typing natural-language queries with smartphone-level typos and expecting to get answers -- but as someone long used to simple keyword queries, I wish I could have the old system back. Programmers trying to make computers "smart" seem not to understand that unless they're almost flawless, users will just have more trouble trying to work around the "smartness" to tell the computers what they actually want.

amelius• 11 years ago

Of course, because DDG can't build a profile of you, it would have to resort to some guessing.

For example, if you search for "python", it would have to guess whether you are a programmer, or a biologist, in order to present the most relevant results. And of course, Google already has all this information...

fpgaminer• 11 years ago

I've had this question for awhile ... What is the advantage to using DuckDuckGo, with respect to privacy? All I've found is that they say privacy is important and that they don't track users. But I see no way for them to prove that. So you still have to trust them not to spy on you. Perhaps on the whole that is better than alternatives. "Google is definitely spying on me" versus "DuckDuckGo might be spying on me". Is that the only difference, or am I missing something?

If that's the only difference, isn't Google-over-Tor a better option? Known privacy with world-class search results?

duaneb• 11 years ago

Well, it's very unusual in this day for a company to proactively protect your privacy. Whether they actually do is unknowable without encryption.

warfangle2• 11 years ago

Just did a surface audit.

They set and read no cookies. You can test this yourself.

They set etags on static assets, and those theoretically could be used to track you as an identifiable visitor.

How else would they track you? By IP address? That would make any kind of tracking useless -- how would you deal with trying to track 100,000 connections from behind NAT, individually, other than cookies or etags?

There's browser fingerprinting, but I don't see any evidence of that either.

logn2• 11 years ago

If that's the only difference, isn't Google-over-Tor a better option?

No, DDG is better because they don't limit or captcha you over Tor.

Also, brand names do matter. If DDG has staked their reputation on privacy, it's a safer bet. It would be difficult for them to be monetizing personal data when it's their stated policy not to. You'd have to hope the people you're selling this data to keep their mouths shut and so do DDG (ex)employees.

sroerick3• 11 years ago

It's worth supporting companies who are using a privacy-centric business model.

sparaker• 11 years ago

I hope i don't see very irrelevant results again cause i might not return again if it fails again.

Too• 11 years ago

I've been using it for a while too now and my verdict is that i can't remove google from the second row in my search bar but i find the results of ddg to be good enough to use as my first choice.

80% searches work flawlessly on ddg, and for the remaining part you learn which kind of searches that will work and which ones doesn't. Many times i know in advance that this particular query will probably not work here but on google it will and i'll just append !g to the search to go straight to google.

What i find mostly interesting is that I have re-learned to use multiple different search engines, you know like we all did back before in the days, and that it actually helps me find more relevant information. Not only because the quality of Google has dropped significantly the past 5 years but even when google delivers a pretty solid result i check DDG after and i might find an even more relevant result, or an opposing story in a political topic etc. We all learn to check your information sources, this includes your search engine!

tripzilch• 11 years ago

I just put DDG as my default address bar search, and taught myself a bunch of !bang commands, since for much of the stuff I'm looking for I already know what site I want to end up any way (!w, !wnl, !yt, !gi, !wayback, etc).

In the mean time for general searches, I either use DDG's results or slap on a pre-emptive !g on a hunch, randomly or just-in-case. My idea behind this is that, as DDG's results become better, I'll habitually start using !g less and less.

And indeed, DDG's results have become better, and indeed I have been using the !g command less and less.

Google Search with !g is slowly becoming "just another one among the predefined !bang commands", a command I will append after my searches when I specifically desire to find out what Google has to say about a certain query. Though in comparison I hardly ever use !y and !b (Yahoo and Bing, respectively), mostly because I have no clue in what vague sense those results would be better (with DDG vs Google, I sort of have a feeling when asking for something really mundane and stupid, Google always hits the spot exactly, DDG sometimes misinterprets--though less so lately).

For image searching I really use !yi, !bi and !gi pretty much randomly. They all give quite different results, but as far as I've been able to determine, none of them are of particularly better quality than the others. Yahoo Image Search has a nice integration with Flickr though, so I tend to use it more when my target may be found between high-ish resolution photography.

I already named !wayback, anyone got any other cool !bang commands they use often? For instance, any good documentation searches for JS/DOM/HTML/CSS etc? I tried !mdn but I don't like their search result pages. Same for !python, if I do "!python itertools", I want to be taken straight to the itertools module documentation, not a results page of all python docs that contains the term "itertools".

runn1ng• 11 years ago

Just look at Europe's cookie law and law about removal of "personal information" from Google search, how well regulations work.

goodmornings• 11 years ago

I don't want to sound too pessimistic and I agree with the sentiment of the article, but I think people need to come to terms with that there isn't really a choice to be made here. Just like you suddenly isn't going to change the at least decade old path of the NSA, you aren't suddenly going to change the fundamentals of the Internet. The choices that affects us now has to a large extent already been made and we are living with the consequences.

shit_parade2• 11 years ago

I'm also surprised that people are not more skeptical of anything coming out of the white house with Obama's name on it.

Obama has proven himself to be a warmonger with loose ethics unwilling to prosecute torture and also fully interested in continuing the surveillance state, killing Americans without due process, prosecuting whistle-blowers, and protecting the status quo above the constitution and civil rights.

mgreg• 11 years ago

I'm curious if data privacy & protection will ever emerge from its little corner where a few passionate folks worry about it while the masses blithely ignore how their personal data is used and abused.

Couple of other related items just from today indicate this _may_ be taking on steam but we've seen this kind of blip before just to see it fade.

1. Helping Prove Mr. Weinberg's going (CEO of DuckDuckGo) is an article on how heath web sites share your search queries with 3rd parties found at http://motherboard.vice.com/read/looking-up-symptoms-online-... Nice to know that WebMD et al are sharing your _assumed_ private searched for whatever itch you might have with others.

2. Symantec published results of their European survey on the topic of Data Privacy found at http://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/about/presskits/b-stat... Not sure I believe a survey where the respondents claim to read the terms of service 25% of the time.... My guess would have been .25% of the time.

chestnut-tree• 11 years ago

"...health web sites share your search queries with 3rd parties..."

For anyone looking for health information (in English), I recommend the NHS website. (Start your search from there rather than Google if you're worried about being tracked). It may not be the best-looking website, but the info is written by medical professionals and there are no commercial interests since the NHS is funded by the UK taxpayer.

They have an A-Z of conditions, a symptom checker, videos and much more. (I presume this is all available to anyone outside the UK)

http://www.nhs.uk

unprepare• 11 years ago

Unfortunately This falls into the same trap as the US CDC site in the parents linked article.

The NHS site you linked makes requests to google analytics, webtrends and cloudfront. The point in the parents article applies here equally, since what i'm searching will still be analyzed by Google at the very least.

I'm not sure how identifiable this information is though, but definitely important to be aware of

fixermark2• 11 years ago

People are willing to trade personally-identifiable information for a Snickers bar.* Until and unless that changes, privacy doesn't have sufficient value to change the status quo very much.

*Really, they'll even trade it for intangible gold. http://candycrushgametactics.com/get-free-gold-bars-in-candy...

ashark• 11 years ago

It won't change. There's no way the average person is going to spend the kind of time and effort it would take to fight the pervasive privacy violations we're seeing now. Even if they all say they want better privacy, there's only so much stuff a person can keep up with / so many hours in a day. The market doesn't cater to what we want, it caters to what we have time to understand and the willpower to act on and, outside that very slim set of things, what is most profitable (e.g. selling our data).

Coordination problems. Coordination problems as far as the eye can see.

drzaiusapelord• 11 years ago

Trading for a snickers bar is the default. How can I stop the default and who gets to decide what my punishment is if I do?

Let's say google offers some kind of privacy plan, which is 100% outside of their interests. Do you think they'll give me honest pricing if I opted out of all their tracking? Lets say they actually make $15 off me annually via tracking. What would they charge me to not be spied on? It sure as hell won't be $15.

The problem is we're not being offered a fair value in the beginning when we get into a relationship with these companies. Cloud providers are throwing snickers bars at me and not offering to stop. When I do say I don't want them, I'm hit with punitive pricing. Look at AT&T's gigapower charge to not be spied on. Its like $40 a month. Sorry, but I doubt anyone is making $40 a month from someone like me who almost never clicks on ads and whose information can't be that valuable. If advertisers are paying AT&T $40 a month to see how long I'm on reddit, then the whole system is well... fucked.

It seems to me that cloud providers and ISPs want their cake and to eat it to. They're double-dipping. I'm still paying somehow, even if its indirectly. I bought $100 worth of apps and movie rentals last quarter via my android device. They sure as hell weren't free. Not only am I subject to market pricing on these items, not to mention my hefty phone bill, I also am being spied on? Where exactly is the 'free' where the products monetize themselves via app store purchases and rentals? VUDU and On Demand charge the exact same amount for these rentals.

This narrative that customers won't pay for things is asinine. We're constantly paying for things.

schimmy_changa• 11 years ago

I think we should have a law where any service which is supported by advertising / data selling also have a paid opt-out feature. If I want to pay Google $100/year for email without ads or trackers, I should be able to do that.

Sure, pricing will probably be set way too high by the companies at first, but even making that explicit tradeoff and the option to purchase will help show consumers that privacy IS valuable.

belorn• 11 years ago

I would like to see a experiment where the test subject are informed that the information will be sold afterward. Are people then willing to trade personally-identifiable information for a Snickers bar?

Addition parameters that would be interesting: Inform that the information is worth more/less than the Snickers bar, or inform that "the government" will have free access to the information.

DaveWalk• 11 years ago

Are people then willing to trade personally-identifiable information for a Snickers bar?

Not as cheap as a Snickers, but I once had a CS professor do a straw poll of the class for this experiment. Back in the day the most evident tracking was through customer loyalty cards at grocery stores. He asked the class: how much money do you save per visit using your loyalty card? $10? And would you instead pay $10 each time to not be tracked?

Perhaps not surprisingly, in 2007 a room full of undergrads would take the discount.

kardos• 11 years ago

Why is someone else's poor choice regarding privacy a justification for abandoning the fight for privacy?

There's always a subset of people who don't care. There was a time when women didn't have the right to vote, and although I wasn't around during that time, I'm sure there was a subset of women who didn't care. Their apathy is not a justification for withholding that right from the rest.

stcredzero6• 11 years ago

There's always a subset of people who don't care.

The problem is when it's the seeming majority who don't care.

hawleyal• 11 years ago

Newsflash, people are stupid.

dmschulman4• 11 years ago

The myth of "partially anonymize" data is infuriating. As an academic exercise I've begun to pore over Privacy Policies for web new services I find, specifically how my account info will be used with third parties.

No new consumer oriented web product in their right mind would advertise "we monetize your data with third parties", but they all include language in their Privacy Policies about sharing "partially anonymize" data. It might make you feel safe and sound when it comes to Company X protecting your identity, but marketers and other organizations don't look at data points in a vacuum, everything is in aggregate, and your aggregate profile represents you to the highest degree of certainty.

dasboth3• 11 years ago

"As an academic exercise I've begun to pour over Privacy Policies for web new services"

This is something I've been thinking of doing. I don't suppose you've shared these anywhere online by any chance? I always thought that would make a good site - somewhere where you can look up certain services' privacy policies in layman's terms. I suspect a good one already exists.

drdaeman2• 11 years ago

https://tosdr.org/

nine_k• 11 years ago

/* spelling/autocorrect: it's 'pore over', not 'pour over' */

dmschulman4• 11 years ago

Fixed, cheers

falcor84• 11 years ago

I upvoted you, but I also enjoy seeing these kinds of mistakes which either get me to imagine new metaphors, and/or (like in this case) get me to learn about real-world things. Turns out that pour-over is a coffee brewing method: http://coffee.wikia.com/wiki/Pour-Over_Filtration_Brewing

TeMPOraL• 11 years ago

Exactly. There is no such thing as "anonymized data", there is only "not enough context" and "I need more computing power!". It's important to understand what one is up against when fighting for privacy.

Incidentally, that's part of the reason why I'm having this feeling, that the future is a choice - "privacy or progress, pick one". Because if you really, really care about privacy and anonymity, the sheer amount of otherwise very useful data you'd have to forbid processing and sharing of is staggering. Take for instance shopping. Should we prevent retailers from collecting transactions data? Should we prevent them from installing CCTVs to deter theft? If neither, then how we're going to prevent them from correlating those two sets to keep a profile on you?

(yes, I know retailers now use credit card data and club cards for that - but say one or both data sets will become unavailable - then they'll start looking for alternatives)

It's a serious question. I don't see reducing data collection as a viable strategy, and I'm not sure if we can present entities from sharing data sets with each other. I'd like to know what could be the long-term privacy perserving strategy that doesn't require us to roll back the computer age.

dmschulman4• 11 years ago

Yeah it's tricky because online consumer tracking is just the evolution of a methodology which has been in place for a long time (like supermarket club cards you mentioned). Working in marketing gives you a sense of just how pervasive it is, what tricks are at one's disposal, and I think an individual company should be allowed to know how consumers use and value a their products, but being able to sell that information to a third-party is where the line needs to be drawn.

I don't know if Congress is the solution (http://thehill.com/policy/technology/215457-big-data-lobbyis...), I don't believe any branch of the US government has enough of an understanding with tech issues to pass effective regulation. I hope to be proven wrong though.

The most realistic way, in my opinion, to achieve some degree of reform is by encouraging businesses at a grassroots level to just simply not engage in these kinds of practices. That's an even tougher sell to many businesses than getting Congress to pass a law, but I'm heartened by companies like DuckDuckGo who build a product around the idea of "user privacy above all else". I think if that idea becomes popular enough and new businesses become noble enough to stick to their principals on issues of privacy (vs selling out to make $$) we might have an effective solution.

angersock3• 11 years ago

The annoying thing is that, even if we prevent them from harvesting data on us, there's nothing to prevent them from convincing our friends/parents/coworkers from sharing that information on our behalves.

drdaeman2• 11 years ago

Except for the lack of data. Don't share things you consider private (and that are indeed private and not just things you don't want to expose but can't really do so, like your own face) with those who you don't trust. This is the most secure approach among all possibilities.

angersock3• 11 years ago

So, consider "Hey, tomorrow is angersock's 34th birthday! We're organizing a surprise party in his hometown of jonestown!".

Now, they've given away my age, birthdate, and where I was born. That's the sort of information that, while private and something I don't give away, they know and give away without thinking.

j2kun9• 11 years ago

There is a possibility to share statistical analysis of data privately. This is the subfield of computer science known as differential privacy, and I bet companies just looking for trend data (not specific targeting) would be able to benefit from user data without compromising user privacy.

In other words, there are good and bad ways to use user data, some of the good ones are provably private, and we shouldn't rule out all data sharing as inherently evil.

cheatsheet8• 11 years ago

provably private

citation?

j2kun9• 11 years ago

http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/74339/dwork_tamc.pdf

They define the mathematical guarantees on privacy, which are computational guarantees against a polynomial-time adversary trying to distinguish between the analyses of two databases that differ in a single record. I.e., nobody can reasonably tell whether your information is included in the analysis.

rqebmm• 11 years ago

we shouldn't rule out all data sharing as inherently evil.

I agree. However, that's going to be the knee-jerk reaction for a while precisely because huge entities like Google, NSA, AT&T, Verizon, etc have been doing that data sharing while doing an abysmal job of notifying users about what was happening. Eventually I think we'll settle into a happy medium, but we're in the pushback phase at the moment.

oconnore3• 11 years ago

That's all fine, but there is zero evidence that any company is doing that.

Furthermore, even if a company was using differential privacy to anonymize data between the collection and the processing step, there is no way to prove that the data is being handled appropriately before and during the collection step. Also, there is no way for a company to prove that they continue to handle data appropriately over time.

These tools are super useful for releasing data sets to the public from a trusted source (such as a healthcare provider assisting researchers by releasing cancer data), but that's not what we're talking about here.

j2kun9• 11 years ago

It is a new field, I admit, but it shows there's a false dichotomy between privacy and stopping all data collection and analysis.

LeapYear Innovations [1] looks like they have some clients who care about differential privacy. [2]

[1] http://www.leapyearinnovations.com/

[2] http://www.leapyearinnovations.com/shroudbase

AdmiralAsshat• 11 years ago

And there are indeed a few solutions that actually grant you partial relief from the pains of online tracking. First, switch your search engine, email and other major services where your personal information is heavily tracked to good private alternatives. Second, add EFF’s HTTPS Everywhere plugin to your browser, which will encrypt web site connections where possible. Third, add EFF’s Privacy Badger plugin to your browser, which blocks third-party trackers. These three simple changes will pretty seamlessly and significantly reduce your digital footprint.

Since this is a quote from the article, I feel this is an appropriate space to ask: does anyone have a page explaining how these various privacy extensions interact/overlap with each other? I tend to install (or at least try out) pretty much every popular one at some point or another, and I'm hoping to reduce redundancies. Alot of these tools show up on recommended "Get These If You're Serious About Privacy" lists without indicating what exactly each extension does or how it might interact with another extension. These include:

- Adblock Plus - Ghostery - Disconnect - HTTPS Everywhere - EFF Privacy Badger - uBlock - NoScript

At this point, I've "slimmed" down to just HTTPS Everywhere and uBlock, although I'm debating adding Privacy Badger. However, their own page mentions that it's "based on ABP code" [0], so my thought is that uBlock is probably also taking care of it.

Is that sufficient? Is there any danger in installing Privacy Badger and uBlock, for instance, if they serve the same function? Will they step on each other's toes?

Some kind of comparison chart would be useful.

[0] https://www.eff.org/privacybadger#how_is_it_different

joosters• 11 years ago

There is a chance that some extensions will interfere with each other. For instance, Ghostery mentions this on their options page:

Warning! When combined with other cookie monitoring addons such as Beef Taco, Cookie Monster, and Google Opt-Out, this feature can cause unresponsive script errors. If you experience this error, please try disabling this feature or conflicting addons.

schoen6• 11 years ago

That kind of problem used to happen with DOS TSRs (the equivalent of multitasking extensions or daemon processes). It's funny to think that the reason for browser extension incompatibilities is kind of analogous to the reason for TSR incompatibilities: both of them will hook function calls in the system whose functionality they're extending, and make assumptions about how they can alter, act on, or cancel the function call without breaking things, and whether or how it needs to be passed along afterwards. If only one extension is loaded, these assumptions aren't stressed very much, but when several are loaded the assumptions can conflict.

(That analogy isn't perfect because the TSRs also had an issue about patching the interrupt descriptor table, which is where the system looks up the location of an interrupt handler; one common problem was that if TSRs weren't unloaded in the same order in which they were loaded, the table could be "restored" with values that were not actually current, which I don't think is a problem that has an equivalent for browser extensions!)

falcolas3• 11 years ago

I have personally found that a hosts file can reduce the need for a bunch of those addons - it can block not only ads, but also many forms of tracking. I've found it very refreshing when surfing the web.

For reference, I use: http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

zipperhead• 11 years ago

I've thought of using hosts file vs. plugins but have never really made the switch. I'm a bit concerned that I'll run into cases like a website is broken due to a hosts file setting, and I can't easily bypass it like I can with a plugin. Do you ever run into situations like this?

rocky11382• 11 years ago

Does having thousands of lines in your hosts file degrade browser performance due to increased length of lookups?

hackuser5• 11 years ago

A related question: If someone with expertise or data could compare the effectiveness of tracker-blocking solutions, such as Ghostery and Disconnect, it would be helpful.

XzetaU83• 11 years ago

µBlock vs Adblock Plus vs Ghostery vs Disconnect vs No blocker https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/%C2%B5Block-and-other...

hackuser5• 11 years ago

Try RequestPolicy. It blocks all requests to domains other than the host's, unless you whitelist them. It comes with optional whitelists you can use for popular sites.

On one hand, it's cumbersome, requiring you to whitelist some requests and reload when you visit a new webpage (most sites require a CDN at least). On the other, it's easy to use and good security.

pikzen2• 11 years ago

Additionally, try RequestPolicyContinued[0] because the original RequestPolicy dev has stopped maintaining it.

[0] http://requestpolicycontinued.github.io

XzetaU83• 11 years ago

The "based on ABP code" apply only For the Chromium/Chrome version

"For the Firefox version of Privacy Badger, we also eschewed the ABP engine in favor of something we wrote ourselves. Don't get me wrong, ABP is a great tool and we learned a lot from its code - but we wanted something as lean and performant as possible....."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7686396

also ublock makes ABP, Ghostery & Disconnect redundant. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/%C2%B5Block-and-other...

steeples• 11 years ago

AFAIK the only way to do tracking is some combination of images and JS. All these 'blocking' plugins are redundant when those two seemingly elephants in the room are disabled.

lnanek2• 11 years ago

Honestly, I kind of prefer the new AT&T solution where they charge you ~$30 more to do nothing with your data. If paranoid people want this, then by all means, let them pay for it.

TruthWillFree7• 11 years ago

You trust them? How do you know this just makes you more suspicious and gives them more of an illogical basis for placing you under increased surveillance.

fixermark2• 11 years ago

Sure I trust them. The moment it's discovered that they've failed to hold up their end of the bargain, they're out $30 x some significant percentage of the users of that service per month. That's not chump change (to say nothing of the potential class action lawsuit for utterly failing to hold up a contract while continuing to charge customers for the services stipulated in said contract).

hackuser5• 11 years ago

* Should privacy only be available to people who can afford $360/yr?

* What good is confidentiality on AT&T, when everyone else still is tracking you (websites, cellular provider, electric utility, car manufacturer, CCTV operators, etc.).

* Should privacy require you to pay every one of those businesses $360/year?

Also, AT&T easily could buy the the information they are forgoing from a third party, and for much less than $360/year/customer.

pikzen2• 11 years ago

paranoid

Is it really paranoïa when this is already the case ?

Google's entire business is based around getting your data and selling it to advertisers. More and more startups and companies offer a "free" service in exchange for your personal data which they sell back. Hekl, half of HN probably already works in a startup whose business model is exactly that.

You have absolutely no say in how your data gets used. You also have no guarantee that AT&T actually respect your choice. Sorry for not being OK with my personal information getting passed through fifty servers around the world for various advertising companies.

In the case of AT&T it's even worse because they have a monopoly on the medium: you don't get to choose where your data passes through when calling someone. At least Internet allows people to run µMatrix, RequestPolicy and others, limiting the amount that gets sent through.

rhino369• 11 years ago

The paranoia is the fear that the data about you will actually cause you a non-trivial harm.

TruthWillFree7• 11 years ago

The fight for privacy has to start at universities. At Georgia Tech, the faculty are routinely involved in unwarranted surveillance and testing out their fundamentally flawed ideas to sell off to the national security apparatus. Such tests I would classify as being human experimentation with a critical need for more transparency with the public. Without a broad education that contains humanities, arts, and ethics we won't get the technical solutions we need that address core societal issues. Instead we have an cancerous culture in engineering that threatens our position among other first world countries. Not all engineers have the same commitment to ethics and unfortunately the most unethical don't have the proper economic incentives for respecting human rights, liberty, and dignity. It's time to take a stand for privacy, against the exploitation of technology, and against unethical human experimentation. Georgia Tech's campus is a good place to start...

linkregister• 11 years ago

What kind of surveillance is going on there? What kind of experiments are happening there?

TruthWillFree7• 11 years ago

They psychologically torture and harass people to produce false confessions or force people to do things against their will. Think what happened to Aaron Swartz, but on crack... Chicago, I'm sure is no different... http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-polic...

Matachines• 11 years ago

University is the last place for privacy conscious programmers.

Colleges use Google Apps (including e-mails), the student body (for the most part) all want to work for Google/Facebook/etc, college culture encourages social media (plenty of clubs almost exclusively do their planning and events on FB) and students look up to the founders of the aforementioned companies, or other non-privacy conscious tech people.

anon012012• 11 years ago

Sometimes I think privacy is bound to die because of nuclear bombs. What stops a country sneaking bombs into another? We need total knowledge of what's in the city. But maybe I'm wrong, I haven't thought it through.

recondite• 11 years ago

I really want to recommend (upvote) his post, but Medium requires me to sign in with Twitter or Facebook to do so. Great.

owly2• 11 years ago

Funny how that works. :(

happyscrappy• 11 years ago

Choose what? To live like Stallman? Even his data leaks all over the place. Absolute privacy, like all absolutes, is a sandcastle in the path of an incoming tide. I am all for encrypted comm but metadata is almost as bad and virtually unavoidable. Why was no one creeped out that Starfleet always knows where every crew member is at all times?

whyever• 11 years ago

I thought they don't if people do not carry their communicator. So basically the same as today?

code_duck• 11 years ago

Starfleet personal are in some sort of military organization and are constantly exposed to some sort of danger. Not to mention, on a space ship managed by some kind of artificial intelligence. It makes sense the Federation would keep tabs on them.

TheMagicHorsey• 11 years ago

I'm curious how DuckDuckGo makes money. They don't charge us for search results, and they don't use our information to target ads. How do they make money to run their operations?

dmschulman4• 11 years ago

Donations (https://flattr.com/thing/38589/DuckDuckGo)

Referral programs (Amazon)

and VC funding

AFAIK

rocky11382• 11 years ago

I've seen ads on their site related to keywords in my search query.

bonn1• 11 years ago

Clever Marketing gig from DDG's CEO Weinberg (as recommended in his book 'Traction').

The post makes sense, DDG makes sense, good timing, ok no news to most of us but a good way to get people again talking about DDG.

Considering that DDG is 'just' a Yandex whitelabel (before Bing) with some extra features, especially the no tracking, it's surprising how big it got with Weinberg's Marketing hacks. Congrats!

mikerichards2• 11 years ago

Obama's natural inclination is to never to "regulate" the power of government, but to regulate industry. Government's intrusion of our privacy is the much bigger problem, but Obama just says "look over there at those big internet companies, forget about the NSA, CIA, IRS and other numerous government agencies and unaccountable bureaucrats that want to snoop into and control your private lives. Forget that the government has the guns that can force you. I'll throw the boogey-strawman of "big internet" to appease you"

Retra3• 11 years ago

Obama is not a member of congress. He doesn't write laws or regulations.

mikerichards2• 11 years ago

The first sentence of the post.

Any day now President Obama is going to propose a new privacy bill of rights that will give you much more control over your personal information.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/online-privacy-bill-wh...

mirimir• 11 years ago

I believe that prudent compartmentalization is the best way to control tracking and reclaim privacy. Each compartment comprises interests, relationships and activities that you want observers to track and interrelate. For compartments where privacy is essential, it's best to use pseudonyms, and to avoid cross-linking with public compartments.

Compartments are isolated in VMs, with separate network connectivity using nested chains of VPNs, JonDonym and Tor. Particularly sensitive compartments are isolated in separate computers. It's prudent to avoid cross-compartment sharing of USB drives.

tacoman• 11 years ago

This is incredibly hard to do well and takes a great deal of discipline. Unless you're a Belgacom or Gemalto sysadmin, the consequences of cross-contamination aren't grave. It's easy enough to burn an identity and create a new one.

stcredzero6• 11 years ago

Each compartment comprises interests, relationships and activities that you want observers to track and interrelate.

Excellent! There are a lot of historical precedents for technology enabling intermediation! Such intermediation comes with power, which does need to be tempered with some regulation. (The minimum possible, due to regulatory capture, of course.)

stcredzero6• 11 years ago

Pretty much all technologies have facets where markets break down and require some form of corrective regulation to make things work the way we want them to.

No! Nooooooo! Say it isn't so! The market is a magical infallible oracle of laissez-faire goodness! (That snidely said, the market is absolutely a marvellous thing in precisely the contexts where situations are so complex that centralized control is hopeless and only massively distributed decision making can hope to keep up. Again, context is everything.)

murbard2• 11 years ago

In which category do you think the question of how privacy should be managed between websites and their customers, across all kind of business models, all types of customers, and all sorts of data fit? A complex situation that needs context aware distributed decision, or a problem simple enough that regulation can unambiguously help?

stcredzero6• 11 years ago

Of course, there are actually a great number of questions, not just one. One of the biggest problems is that there is not enough knowledge in general society yet for markets to work well enough wrt privacy. One thing that lawmakers should be keenly aware of, is that broadly written regulations can be helpful at first, but then become burdensome in a mature market or in the face of technological change.

Nanzikambe• 11 years ago

Fascinating, wake me up when this ethereal bill appears and offers protections for the privacy of all humans regardless of nationality, and not just some humans.

owly2• 11 years ago

Thank you. DDG should be the default in Firefox and iOS.

jwatte• 11 years ago

Privacy is not achievable. It's much better to build a world where we can all live happy /without/ privacy.

This requires an attitude adjustment and significant tolerance because everything is public.

Want to know if your bank treats customers good or bad? Look it up. Want to know if the issuer bets against a mortgage backed security? Audit the numbers. Want to cheat on your taxes? Tough luck!

The thing is, we only have two options:

1. Only spooks and marketers and those who pay, know.

2. We all know.

0x5f3759df-i• 11 years ago

You are presenting a false dichotomy and your conclusion that "privacy is not achievable" is a claim without any justification.

http://mind.ucsd.edu/syllabi/98-99/logic/falsedichotomy.html

jqm• 11 years ago

I don't think we are at a privacy crossroad. I think the fork was taken some time ago and now it's just a matter of how fast and reckless we go, and just who is going to be doing the driving.

Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

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