[HN Gopher] More Privacy and Transparency for DuckDuckGo Web Tra...
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More Privacy and Transparency for DuckDuckGo Web Tracking
Protections
Author : TangerineDream
Score : 47 points
Date : 2022-08-05 13:04 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spreadprivacy.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (spreadprivacy.com)
| plugin-baby wrote:
| So much negative in this thread! Thanks for a better alternative,
| which after a decade is a viable alternative daily driver.
| whollythrowaway wrote:
| As far as I know this forum hasn't become the Buzzfeed Book
| Reviews of technology
| (https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/30/opinion/banning-the-
| negat...).
|
| A browser? Extensions? Replacing your search engine? From one
| company? That sounds familiar. People are equally skeptical and
| negative of Chrome's security, tracking and ads policies.
| [deleted]
| krono wrote:
| Protection for thee but not from me "improving.duckduckgo.com"
| yegg wrote:
| All requests to improving.duckduckgo.com are anonymous. We have
| a help page explaining how that works here:
| https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
| pages/privacy/at.... From that page, "To be clear, this means
| we cannot ever tell what individual people are doing since
| everyone is anonymous."
| yegg wrote:
| Hi, I'm the author of this post and the CEO & Founder of
| DuckDuckGo. I'm happy to answer questions about it. I hope folks
| can read the whole thing but in short, the post explains we're
| expanding our 3rd-Party Tracker Loading Protection to include
| blocking Microsoft trackers from loading, how this works with
| DuckDuckGo search ads, and a new help page that covers details on
| all our web tracking protections:
| https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/we...
| thankful69 wrote:
| Are the search results being "curated" by its political nature
| or affiliation?
| yegg wrote:
| They actually never were. We also recently put out a help
| page explaining how our news rankings work:
| https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
| pages/results/ne.... From that page: "when we apply our own
| ranking signals we do so in a strictly non-political manner,
| meaning we don't evaluate or otherwise take into account any
| potential political bias or leanings of websites in our
| search result rankings."
| somenameforme wrote:
| That entire page suggests extremely opaque behavior for a
| post about increasing transparency. Where can I find a list
| of which sites have been manually "downranked" and by how
| much? What are the "non-governmental" and "non-political"
| agencies declaring said sites to be whatever you're
| declaring them to be? Where are the links to the reports
| that informed your decisions?
| yegg wrote:
| This is a new help page, and so it is just a first step
| in more transparency on this issue. That said, what
| you're referencing in the page applies extremely rarely,
| currently to less than 0.1% of news websites, and it is
| expected to stay that way. So, you are unlikely to
| regularly encounter this ranking signal. And even then
| it's impact is relatively small, only a few slots on
| average -- from the page, "impacted sites are not moved
| so far down in the results that they are effectively
| removed."
| somenameforme wrote:
| So are you implying that you do have plans on revealing
| plans on revealing which sites you're "downranking"? And
| ideally precisely how they fit your criteria?
|
| I feel quite strongly about this because I, like I
| suspect many who use DDG, swapped over largely because I
| didn't really like the games Google was playing with
| search. As DDG goes down the same path I've moved on once
| again, but have been left with quite a sour taste in my
| mouth. I evangelized for your site for years, including
| on this site/account. Changes like this are the
| antithesis of everything that drew many people to DDG to
| begin with.
| thankful69 wrote:
| Cool, thanks for the clarification.
| lysergia wrote:
| Gabriel, whilst you're answering questions here, I have one
| slightly tangential question and it's as follows: why does DDG
| not have a warrant canary?
|
| I'm skeptical of using the service since it's a US based
| service and the US doesn't have a good track record when it
| comes to privacy.
|
| For this reason I only ever use DDG combined with an anonymous
| mixer service like Tor. It would be trivial for bad actors to
| be placed in your data center and tie specific IPs to
| particular searches, no?
| yegg wrote:
| Warrant canaries are problematic since they can't be trusted
| themselves due to possible confidentiality restrictions, can
| be easily misinterpreted, and can also be counter-productive
| to an in-process court proceeding if you are in an actual
| situation that would involve triggering one. Thankfully we
| haven't ever been in any situation like this because we
| simply don't collect any search histories or meta data that
| ties searches to individuals (like IP addresses). And our
| searches are end-to-end encrypted so network onlookers cannot
| see them, even if listening in on the network.
| whollythrowaway wrote:
| How did you guys get into so much jeopardy over the Microsoft
| partnership in the first place? How did Startpage figure all
| this out, apparently with even better privacy protections, for
| longer, and with Google's Index - the best one? What is going
| on?
| yegg wrote:
| This is actually about our browser and web tracking
| protections within it around third-party scripts on other
| websites. From the post: "Microsoft scripts were never
| embedded in our search engine or apps, which do not track
| you. Websites insert these scripts for their own purposes,
| and so they never sent any information to DuckDuckGo."
| whollythrowaway wrote:
| If you expand the boundary of end user privacy services to
| "browser extensions," isn't the most intellectually honest
| answer to have people use an EasyList-adjacent accelerated
| solution, like uBlock Origin or AdGuard on mobile? That is
| certainly the consensus here. Is anything in the blog post
| an improvement compared to that offering?
|
| That's why I'm asking about Startpage. Why do you think
| DuckDuckGo uniquely got put into a position of jeopardy -
| something more than scrutiny - when others did not?
| yegg wrote:
| Yes, please check out the comprehensive help page
| referenced for the list of web tracking protections we
| offer by default across platforms, some of which are not
| offered by related extensions, and most all of which are
| not offered by most browsers by default:
| https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
| pages/privacy/we.... This is the full list for
| reference/comparison (platform support can vary and in
| some cases is impossible, but working hard to get them on
| all platforms -- the help page has all the details): 3rd-
| Party Tracker Loading Protection, 3rd-Party Cookie
| Protection, 1st-Party Cookie Protection, CNAME Cloaking
| Protection, Fingerprinting Protection, Smarter Encryption
| (HTTPS Upgrading), Link Tracking Protection, Referrer
| Tracking Protection, Embedded Social Content Tracking
| Protection, Google AMP Protection, Google Topics
| Protection, Google FLEDGE Protection, Surrogates, The
| Fire Button, Cookie Consent Pop-Up Management, Global
| Privacy Control (GPC).
|
| More fundamentally though our web tracking protections
| are built upon a data set (we call Tracker Radar) that is
| frequently updated based on web crawling (we call our
| Tracker Radar Detector), which offers a much more
| comprehensive picture of third-party web tracking of
| which to base lists and evolving protections relative to
| solely community maintained lists. Both of these are open
| source on github. We also have an analogous data set for
| our HTTPS upgrade list (we call Smarter Encryption),
| updated daily based on continuous crawling, which is also
| open source.
| godelski wrote:
| Are there plans to do more search than wrapping Bing and
| Yandex?
| yegg wrote:
| That isn't an accurate characterization of what we do now. We
| have on the order of a million lines of search code at this
| point and have a lot of talented people working them. As an
| example, mobile searches are the largest category of
| searches, and local searches are the largest category of
| searches within mobile. We don't get any local search content
| from Bing. Instead our local search content is a combination
| of our own indexes in partnership with Apple, TripAdvisor,
| and others. And then we have to further have a lot of code to
| know when and where to display that content on the page
| relative to other types of results, when to reject that
| content for not being relevant enough to display, and how to
| display parts of it that are relevant enough. In addition, we
| currently do not use Yandex for search content.
| mda wrote:
| Doesn't change the fact that ddg is basically a front for
| mostly Bing (plus a few others for local stuff etc) though.
| Why not actually investing in real search technology and
| become an actual search engine?
| yegg wrote:
| We've invested many tens of millions of dollars in search
| technology and continue to do so. Local was just one
| example, chosen because as noted it is the largest
| category of searches.
| lapcat wrote:
| What can you do to prevent sites from getting removed from
| DuckDuckGo as a side effect of Bing mistakenly deindexing
| the sites?
|
| https://www.jessesquires.com/blog/2022/07/25/my-website-
| disa...
|
| https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/bing.html
|
| https://io.bikegremlin.com/28530/microsoft-bing-serp-gone-
| ov...
|
| https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-
| bing/help-w...
| yegg wrote:
| Best would be to report them to us and we can
| investigate. I see these ones coming up though right now:
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=jessesquires.com,
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lapcatsoftware.com,
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bike.bikegremlin.com
| lapcat wrote:
| Yes, I was able to restore some sites to Bing by Twitter
| DMing a Microsoft Bing VP. ;-)
|
| Where can cases like this be reported to DuckDuckGo?
| yegg wrote:
| Probably best is the 'Share Feedback' button on our SERP,
| though we're also listening on social channels.
| calculatte wrote:
| Congratulations on throwing yourself into the dumpster of
| internet search. I appreciate your efforts to push people
| toward using Brave Search, Qwant, and Presearch instead of
| DDG's censored results. Keep "curating" yourself out of the
| ecosystem.
| yegg wrote:
| We don't censor results. Unless legally prohibited, you
| should find all media outlets in our results. Related, we
| recently published another help page explaining how our news
| rankings work: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
| pages/results/ne....
| groffee wrote:
| Sure you do. Remember tank man? [0]
|
| You don't index shit yourselves so when Bing censors
| something you do too.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925
| yegg wrote:
| We do index many things (see related comment at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32360874). We do not
| remove any results ourselves for political purposes and
| in fact we have been banned in China for many years for
| that very reason. What you're referring to was a
| temporary bug in our image search results from Bing that
| they promptly fixed. If they hadn't fixed it promptly
| then we would have taken further action.
| barbacoa wrote:
| Just now I went to RT.com and searched various article
| titles verbatim on DDG, they came up near the bottom half
| of results. I repeated this test with WSJ and found the
| link as the #1 result. From this it wouldn't be
| unreasonable to believe that either you or the sources
| you pull from are engaging in arbitrary website
| throttling/downranking.
|
| I hear you when you say you don't remove content, but do
| you, or to what extent do you throttle/downrank websites?
| SebaSeba wrote:
| Might it have any effect on the ranking that rt.com is
| nowadays blocked on a national level in most parts of the
| western world?
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(page generated 2022-08-05 23:01 UTC)