It can be horrible. I was helping take care of my mother-in-law, so I had to search for information on her health problems and discussed some of them in my iCloud mail but to someone with a Gmail account. So I think the data was harvested via that email conversation and not via my searches, which were conducted on Duck Duck Go. How the data got attached to me even though I was using my iCloud address…I don’t really know. Maybe I’m wrong but somehow advertisers were able to connect me to these medical concerns. So my point is basically data harvesting and ad targeting have a dark side. And it is this:
It’s funny, I use Bing as my default on all my devices and I’m pretty happy with it. Does what I need it to do without much fuss.
It’s kind of weird that I like a lot of Google products but I am not a fan of their search engine. I came to prefer Bing and then its more privacy oriented version Duck Duck Go to Google search, even though so many here talk about how inferior alternatives to Google are.
Me too. But I was surprised someone mentioned it. AltaVista was really good back in the day. I had to look it up because I though I was missing something.
maybe they are. i think there were rumours of them looking into it.
lol Apple does not want the best for its customers, it wants to make as much money as possible.
My wife and mother know the difference between a Ferrari and a Civic. They understand what Google is. My contention is they (and many others) would just consider a search in the address field of Mobile Safari would be "googling something," in the same way (if you're old enough) "xeroxing" something was the same as photocopying, irrespective of the brand of machine used.
Most probably do, but many do not. I tried DuckDuckGo years ago and it sucked, it’s my default browser now and it’s great for the things I search for.
Your contention is that if Apple was privacy minded they would make DuckDuckGo the default. My contention is the people will notice. A lot of people will notice. Many people don’t care about privacy and use google for their own reasons. DuckDuckGo more than not stinks for certain things and I have to resort to google.com in the address bar. And yes back in the day it was “xerox it”. Today when I tell someone to google something I mean literally google.com. But that is me.
It is you, guy on macrumors.com with a screen name of I7 guy.
We’re “arguing” about apple hypocrisy by taking money from google and if apple were privacy minded they wouldn’t take money and set the default to DDG. @IllinoisCorn contention is most people wouldn’t know the difference. I agree if you are 50 or older. But 35 and under they are right there technically. 55 and under have a pretty good understanding. Apple is giving the people what they want and are getting paid for it.
This is what I am saying. Plop a search engine in front of random person A and they will just search and not really think of a "Google" search or a "DDG" or "Yahoo" search. It's ALL THE SAME TO MOST PEOPLE. The idea that one of my 45 year old peers would stop and say..."well, that's not exactly google...let me go to google.com..." is nuts.
Sorry to hear about your situation. Have you tried resetting the advertising ID on the affected devices?
When I worked in repair service, most people not only couldn't tell the difference between search engines (or search engine and web browser at all); most of them had some spyware installed that replaced their start page with some ad-injecting crap. And I mean vast majority of them. They either didn't notice or didn't care, even though the logos and addresses were different and the search pages were plastered with ads. I fixed it for them as a courtesy and they still didn't notice. Not even once I got someone saying "by the way, thanks for fixing my web browser". You're telling me these people would notice the difference between bing and google?
