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DuckDuckGo Enhances Apple Maps Integration, Including Dark Mode
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It’s not disingenuous if you understand how the internet works, how tracking pixels work, and you can leverage reverse lookup services to glue information about you.
Your outbound tracking information is only anonymous to your naked eye.
Not saying that DDG does this, but it’s incredibly naive and ignorant to think you are anonymous.
Hey look....I don't have an agenda here, I still use DuckDuckGo, and I'm personally considering switching to StartPage. Do I think DDG is bad? No. Do I think these points make it bad? Still no.
However, I feel it's in people's best interest if they're made aware of these facts and can make an informed decision themselves....that's all.
If you are paranoid about your identity through a search engine, you can do the following:
1. Create a dummy Gmail account and always search with that account in a different browser. I have several different browsers installed: Canary, Chrome, Firefox, Brave, IE (on my PC), Safari, and Opera. All you have to do is use one browser specifically for searching and that's it.
2. Ensure this browser has no logged in accounts of any sort for anything.
3. If you use Google, go through all of your settings and make sure tracking is turned off everywhere. If you see ads that seem woefully familiar, do not engage them. They are trying to triangulate on you.
4. In whichever browser you choose, also enable incognito.
5. Try this for a week or a month, then download your Google data. You'll see how remarkably little there is.
If you're still paranoid, connect to a VPN and do your searches through the VPN with the above 5 steps. Just keep in mind that they say logs aren't saved, but it could be a fat lie.
If you're still paranoid even after that, tunneling through multiple servers is an option. Essentially you tunnel your traffic through many servers such that if the destination site or someone wanted to figure out who you are, they'd have to figure out all the different servers you've tunneled through. It's not impossible, but every tunnel increases the difficulty exponentially.
I have many active Gmail accounts right now, and each has different results based on what other accounts I've tied to them. The internet (and sometimes Google) often tries to triangulate, but as long as you don't engage the ads like you would to a robocaller, they can only assume similarities but never know for certain that you are the same person.
The main reason people are concerned about privacy is they haven't exercised their due diligence.
I'm not sure I follow... Either DDG is tracking users, building profiles, and monetizing that data or they aren't. Just because they technically could do these things don't mean they are. Obviously, they are technically possible otherwise Alphabet (Google) wouldn't be making billions a year off the data they collect in this manner.
Feel free to read their Privacy Policy to get a better understanding of what they do collect and how it is used.
https://duckduckgo.com/privacy
DDG is horrible for non-English results. I like it so much, but I really cannot use it for my daily usage.
A googol is a mathematical term meaning 10^100. Google modified it so they can get strong trademark rights.
Sounds pretty serious to me, as somebody who knows a little about math, and hardly a "baby choking on applesauce".
I’m just trying to educate and show there are 2 sides here, and it’s not black and white.
I started to write a lot in response, but then I realized I can write a whole medium post about the satire and irony about DDG. It’s a great product with great intentions, but when you start thinking about what it actually does, you realize why it can’t scale and grow
https://www.startpage.com/en/search/privacy-policy.html
I think the point here is you are not being tracked by Google. The Startpage privacy policy is pretty specific what they track and don't track.
In my experience it does. It actually IS Google search results.
As always, many people resort to a binary analysis, e.g., either DDG sucks, or it is better than Google. In reality, the vast majority of the time you will get exactly what you want using either search engine. DDG has it set up very simply to display Google search results if you didn't find what you wanted by simply typing in !G after your search terms. That way you have the best of both worlds.
Keep in mind though, when you use Google search, they keep every search forever and link it to your "Universal Identifier," along with every photo you upload, every gmail sent or received, everywhere you drive, bike, walk, every website you visit every click you make on a website (unless you use a tracker blocker, Google loads a minimum of three trackers on every human on the planet's use of the Internet!), everything you've ever said in front of Google Assistant, every bit of third party financial data, etc., they purchase about you, etc., etc. It's the most massive, beyond imagination collection of virtual dossiers on everyone on the planet they can identify.
Keep in mind though, when you use Google search, they keep every search forever and link it to your "Universal Identifier," along with every photo you upload, every gmail sent or received, everywhere you drive, bike, walk, every website you visit every click you make on a website (unless you use a tracker blocker, Google loads a minimum of three trackers on every human on the planet's use of the Internet!), everything you've ever said in front of Google Assistant, every bit of third party financial data, etc., they purchase about you, etc., etc. It's the most massive, beyond imagination collection of virtual dossiers on everyone on the planet they can identify.
You must not use search a lot.
As paranoid are you are, I hope you don’t have a home mortgage nor work for the city. Because one can simply use that information and reverse look up “private information” about you.
You can search google through ddg. Just use a !g
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Actually I search a ton, and ddg gets decent or great results at least 80% of the time—lately it has been about 90% actually. Also, just because I have to put some information out there doesn’t mean I just shouldn’t worry about privacy at all... as far as Google, I do have an account and set everything to forget and then don’t use it.
It seems that Google is the only choice for people in Taiwan.
I had been using the !bang function for long time, but I had to finally give up as !g often becomes Google in simplified Chinese.
You don't have to have a mortgage or work for the government for there to be a lot of data about you on the web. That data is generally not considered "private,"and while it may help you feel better about your choices of services to use, but it's just plain silly to suggest that means you should just give up and shrug about Google having a copy of every email sent or received, every photo of you and your family, every web search, every web click, everywhere you've driven, every document uploaded, everything said to GA, every place visited, etc., etc. etc., all linked together in a virtual dossier controlled by a mega corporation that can do whatever it wants with that data, and having it available to hackers, intel agencies, law enforcement, etc.
Just an example, search “!g 25 USD to GBP” or “25 USD to GBP !g” will provide the same query. Did I imagine and comprehend that correctly?
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What’s the “!bang” do compared to just “!g”?
It’s quite silly to parade those conspiracy theories around when you can disable metric gathering from said apps.
Read what I wrote to the Doctor above.
I meant that DDG will redirect to Google in simplified Chinese (I want traditional Chinese), and the results will be somewhat different.
!bang is the general name for all !____.
You lost everyone when you suggested that Google isn't in the business of massively harvesting data on people.
Intersting. I had the opposite experience. After switching to DDG, I found the Google results worse every time I compared. I had the impression that Google prefers to list results that sell stuff. I'm using it in German language, if that makes a difference.
Kind of strange. In Brazilian Portuguese, Google results are far better than DDG. The same in Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, and of course English. For an example, I was shopping for a "Dyson curler" the other day. DDG provided very very poor results, whereas Google provided completely more relevant results. On the other hand if I searched for "C++ string", the results in DDG and Google were comparable.
I hope it's obvious what the key differences between those 2 search terms are.