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
Kagi for the win!
Does not really matter. US can ask another countrys authorities for information. Just look at what happend with protonmail
It is US based LOL!!!
Does not really matter. US can ask another countrys authorities for information. Just look at what happend with protonmail
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
What’s wrong with startpage.com?
Starpage was bought by an advertising company.
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.
I think they had a contractual situation that they were navigating. They were transparent about it and resolved that situation quite quickly.
Edit: Due to using Bing as a backend. It was potentially an uncomfortable bind they found themselves in.
Ah, gotcha.
Yup - tracking and filtering search results; since then I stay away from DDG.
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Personally, I found people to be overreacting and DuckDuckGo‘s actions reasonable and transparent. Here’s the story:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/05/duckduckgo-microsoft-tracking-scripts/
I’ve used Startpage until they got bought by an ad company. Haven’t looked into it since then:
Didn’t know this, thanks for the links.
That adds interesting context. Thanks for links.
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The “Privacy Statement” of Brave Search is somewhat weird tbh. Not clear, Obfuscated.
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https://lemmy.world/post/1510069 :) I am very pleased to tell you Brave is shabby af
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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.
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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.
Yes, it’s good, however you need to be more specific with your query for DDG to return good result.
If you’re interested in other privacy respecting search engines, there’s Searxng and Kagi (paid).
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
Compared to Chrome their browser is probably better for privacy and also zero-effort, if you can get past the lack of features. I think using it as a private/incognito window is pretty feasible, but yeah, it’s hard to recommend as a default browser
Why not use Firefox for a privacy browser?
Agree
I use it as my default phone browser. I like it just because it doesn’t have any history at all unless you whitelist a site (they call it fireproofing). Not that I don’t want anyone to see what I’ve looked at on the internet, but because I don’t care what I’ve already seen.
The other browsers, and especially searches, all pop up your most recent searches. They keep a history of it. Even fucking wikipedia does it. It’s annoying. DDG is just simply there, and that’s a great experience for me when I browse.
All the privacy stuff went out the window years ago. I’m not concerned with all that.
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.
Exactly, there’s just no reason to use anything other than firefox on desktop
On mobile IN MY EXPERIENCE Firefox has always been unbearably slow. I’ve tried everything: getting it from play store, F-Droid and github, using the beta and nightly version, tried it with and without extensions: it sometimes took 10+ seconds to load some pages, I don’t know why. It’s been like this on other smartphone models too.
That’s why I use brave from mobile, it’s blazing fast and it has a lot of nice features, starting from the amazing bottom bar to their solid integrated adblocker and dark mode.
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.
+1 for Firefox on android.
Just a note, the last time I used DDG browser on android while on VPN, the browser had some IP address leak. Not sure whether they fixed it.
Firefox for Android is great, and after some initial teething problems, it’s been solid for a long time.
I remember seeing on reddit a story about a guy who created something and I think suggested DDG stole some of his work and packaged it up as their own. I cannot find it anymore, but remember seeing it at the time and it seemed convincing (even though I was using DDG search and was a fan of their work). I still use them, but not for everything and I remain skeptical. FF is open source, and has been pretty trustworthy for a long time imho.
Well it’s chrome
I use Firefox almost exclusively on android and have nothing but glowing praise for it, it’s a solid experience
I’m OOTL on DDG donations? What kinds of projects/people do they donate to, and how does that benefit pirates?
I’m sorry for the confusion, with “privacy scene” I meant orgs that fight for privacy/freedom on the internet, like Tor, EFF, Fight for the future and more. You can see who they donated to from their blog https://spreadprivacy.com/2022-duckduckgo-charitable-donations/
It’s better than google, and so it’s a good start.
I prefer using DDG or Firefox, however my device I lower end and I find that Brave works best on it.
But I use DDG for my search engine.
Brave had some dodgy stuff at the start with their crypto weirdness. I think there owner was involved in questionable data practices at his last company. Personally, I would expect someone running a privacy company to have integrity and not compromise on those values in previous ventures.
Brave is a serial scammer that has tried one scheme after another.
Hell yeah. I consider myself privacy paranoid and have been using DuckDuckGo for 5 years without any problems so far. It is pretty strict about its privacy policy.
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!
It’s my main search in my browser, so I don’t even type it. Would strongly recommend.
Been using DDG for many years and never new this!
You can also use ddg.gg which is even shorter!
And you don’t even need to go the
websitehomepage, just type something likeddg.gg/search promtand it’ll give you results straight away.This is great even if you use a different search engine because you can use !bangs without needing to go through another webpage.
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
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Misinformation being downranked seems to be a major plus to me. 🤷♀️
+1 Yes!
I don’t understand why people want to see misinformation in their search honestly. There’s a lot of this “oh no its ‘censoring’ my results so its bad” thinking in some parts of the privacy community and its not healthy IMO.
I do that agree that there is a time and a place for censorship though, in some instances it can potentially overstretch what most consider to be fair, but with most things you can’t please everyone. Personally as long as I get 🚢🏴☠️🧲 in my search results I’m happy.
If all search was uncensored, and people were a button click away from seeing NSFL (note: not NSFW) stuff all the time, the internet would be a very different place… and various countries would have likely forgone it in favor of their own national intranet (such as NK or PRC kinda have)
It’s better than google, and so it’s a good start.
Personally, I found people to be overreacting and DuckDuckGo‘s actions reasonable and transparent. Here’s the story:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/05/duckduckgo-microsoft-tracking-scripts/
I’ve used Startpage until they got bought by an ad company. Haven’t looked into it since then:
Their privacy policy and data flow have been the same since the buyout, they were transparent about any implications and the mitigations put in place to protect users, so I’m alright with it. The biggest problem I have with them is sometimes getting rate-limited because of a VPN or Tor, but that’s it. Alternatives like DDG and Brave Search are usually bad for results in my native language, so I’ve been using Startpage for a couple years now and it’s nice
For me Brave search has pretty good results. Not as Google, of course, but enough. Definetly better than DDG.
Its not about how good. How much privacy. Brave search is worse then DDG in all ways and form. Bad Search Results, Weird to get and read Privacy Policy???, Brave had at sometime a crypto miner in it.
I don’t know why you have problem with Brave Search Privacy. They do log operating system and browser version. Is that scary? You can easily bypass this f.e. by using Chameleon Firefox extension.
They have a quirky privacy policy and it is never good.
I think they mostly handled it well, and ultimately the situation was resolved, but I still think they should have been a lot more up front about what they were doing.
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