this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023

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Privacy

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Do you think DuckDuckGo is a good choice for people who are concerned about their privacy? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 year ago by Kagathara@lemmy.ca to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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[–] FIST_FILLET@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

NO.

it is US-based
the CEO is the former founder of the “Names Database”

for the love of god, use anything but DDG. Qwant is EU-based and has decent results, SearX is another one which lets you choose between instances (or host your own).

please stop taking US “privacy” services seriously. i was hoping people would know better on here, compared to reddit

[–] Milk_SDF_Possum@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 year ago

DDG was known as the best option for search engines but then they started talking of censoring stuff and also it has Microsoft trackers and other problems. Yes, it is still better than Google, Bing and Yandex when talking of privacy but with search engines like Qwant and specially SearX (SearXNG) there's no reason to use DDG over these.

[–] UprisingVoltage@feddit.it 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Honestly yeah. There's been some controversies in the past, but for someone who's looking for a zero-effort way to browse privately and support the privacy scene (DDG donates a lot of money) it's a great choice. Wouldn't recommend their browser/extensions though

[–] CrypticCoffee@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Definitely would agree with this. The best of a bad bunch. I use it for nearly all my search.

Did see some sketchy stuff with the android app/browser so probably would avoid... and besides, I'm in a decades long relationship with firefox <3.

[–] janonymous@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

Do you use Firefox on mobile as well? I use the DDG browser and don't whether I should switch. Haven't heard what exactly is wrong with it, yet.

[–] codenul@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Check out Mull browser. There's mobile version as well for desktops. Its lightweight Firefox without any of the telemetry.

[–] snek_boi@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks for the recommendation. I wonder if you're confusing the DuckDuckGo browser with the DuckDuckGo search engine. I am assuming the post is about the search engine 🙃

[–] pabloscloud@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

They didn't define what they mean. Could be both.

[–] DayInProgress@lemmy.ko4abp.com 1 points 1 year ago

And for people who need chromium, there's mulch, a hardened chromium fork with some security patches from vanadium

[–] sunflip@monyet.cc 1 points 1 year ago

I recently started using Kagi. The search result are super good, and no ads. You do have to pay tho. Another good one I like is presearch. Both of these have their own crawler, unlike most other search engines which rely on bing or Google.

[–] rikonium@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago

I ditched it after it dropped the operators like quotes, "OR", "AND", and "-" which hampers it's usefulness to me.

[–] PlasmaK@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

DDG still spies on you. It still better than google, i guess, but i personaly use disroot's searx

[–] svamp@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Didn't DDG get caught allowing some Microsoft tracking and blocking some search results a couple of years back? Personally I use Firefox and starpage as a search engine.

[–] entropicshart@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Yup - tracking and filtering search results; since then I stay away from DDG.

[+] TiffyBelle@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] Rooki@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The "Privacy Statement" of Brave Search is somewhat weird tbh. Not clear, Obfuscated.

[+] TiffyBelle@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] Rooki@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

https://lemmy.world/post/1510069 :) I am very pleased to tell you Brave is shabby af

[+] TiffyBelle@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] 133arc585@lemmy.ml -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Edit: My comment below was based on a faulty understanding of how EDDM mailers worked and a faulty assumption I based on that ignorance. What they did in reality is little more than sending out spam mail, it was not a privacy violation.

Purely from a privacy standpoint, however, there has never been an indication they have violated users’ trust in that regard.

That's simply not true though.

They have sent out direct mailers that basically equated to a customer list leak.

In regards to the mailers, they messed up and passed blame,

In this process, our EDDM vendor made a significant mistake by not excluding names, but instead including names before addresses, resulting in the distribution of personalized mailers.

I hope you consider a customer list leak to be a breach of privacy. And seeing how they didn't take responsibility but tried to pass blame, they didn't take such a mistake very seriously or respond in a manner that instills further trust.

[–] TiffyBelle@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

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[–] 133arc585@lemmy.ml -1 points 1 year ago

I think you may be right actually. When I read this

In this process, our EDDM vendor made a significant mistake by not excluding names, but instead including names before addresses, resulting in the distribution of personalized mailers.

from their statement, I made an assumption because I didn't look at how EDDM works. The way I read "not excluding names, but instead including names" was: We sent a list of names to the vendor; the vendor was supposed to exclude those names, and mail to everyone else in the ZIP, but instead, they mailed to only those names. It seems that's not an accurate understanding of the situation. I think the correct reading is: we said "no names" on our EDDM mailers but they acted as if we said "yes names" on our EDDM mailers.

From my original interpretation, that is essentially a customer list leak, or at least a 'localized' customer list leak, especially for anyone in a shared living environment where someone else may see the name printed on a Brave mailer and learn that that person is a Brave user.

Thanks for clearing it up though. Let me try to go back and edit a few previous comments where I've said this to clarify.

[–] zazaserty@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Its shady for many reasons... I quit using it

I read an article on tor about the problems with many "privacy respecting" search engines, including ddg, here: https://digdeeper.club/articles/search.xhtml

[–] candle_lighter@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah but I find their search results aren't as good an non-private options like Google. So I've always preferred search private engines that provide Google results. Startpage is a great one but if you want one that is open source LibreX is excellent and is better than other FOSS search engines like SearX and Whoogle IMO.

[–] 7heo@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

expired

[–] CaffeinatedNerd@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

For those who still don’t know and find DDG’s name too long to type out than google, you can just input duck.com and it will redirect you to DDG!