It sounds much better than any other US-based search engine I'm aware of. But my own preference doesn't even log an IP address since 2009. You can also bookmark a URL generated with your preferences so there is no need to accept even preference cookies from them (and preferences include options like using POST instead of GET so search terms stay out of other sites' logs). And the aforementioned deal about being outside US jurisdiction is nice too.

DuckDuckGo also does not appear to offer to act as your Web proxy like Startpage will do. I rarely ever use this feature but it's nice that they would offer it. Startpage also offers the option to act as your proxy only for image/video searches, so other sites don't even get that data from you. This is what I like about them: they not only don't log and track you themselves, they also go out of their way to enhance your privacy against third-party sites.

I'm not knocking DuckDuckGo by any means; in my opinion it's good but Startpage/Ixquick is great. Yet, I think all of us benefit from having multiple privacy-conscious options available. Choice is a good thing.

Precisely because they are small and local, they probably wouldn't bother identifying TOR users. As a bonus you wouldn't be accessing this major multinational site where tens of thousands of others had the same idea and already got the exit node IPs banned.

I assume that being outside of US jurisdiction helps, but that's just a guess and I'm no lawyer.

The difference is, DuckDuckGo is headquartered in Paoli, Pennsylvania. You have to dig through their site a while to find that; try the Hiring section. That means they are subject to US fed/state data retention laws and government requests.

Ixquick is headquartered in The Netherlands and (understandably) boasts about not having provided one byte of data to the US government. They've won EU awards because those governments actually recognize the value of privacy. Please see this page for a reference.

Don't get me wrong, DuckDuckGo sounds good. Sounds like they certainly don't actively track you. But I don't see them bragging that they "keep no data to hand over in the first place" and I would be truly surprised if that is entirely an option for them. Certainly they can't tell the US government to piss up a flagpole if and when fishing expeditions come in.

That's not covered by the fee you paid to run Windows?

Which is why I have no qualms whatsoever about blocking ads and taking multiple technological measures to make myself difficult to track. Let them cry a river about it. The real problem is: what little trust may have been there has been thoroughly eroded by an advertising industry showing time and again that it, as an industry, is completely incapable of being reasonable or otherwise regulating itself.

It's too bad for the marketing majors that they want to offer a "service" I do not need and do not want and have chosen to provide endless examples of "offering" (shoving it down throats) it in the most sleazy and underhanded ways. They'll get along without me, somehow.

Yeah. Currently we're working hard on the problem of operating rooms being doctors' personal playgrounds. Anyone who complains about that, points out that doctors have the expertise, or produces any "practical" reason why surgical procedures were designed that way is, of course, advocating for the evil stranglehold doctors have on performing surgery. The doctors always think that way, you know.

I've been using Startpage for years now. They perform a Google search on your behalf while guarding your privacy. They don't even log your IP address. They're the same company that runs Ixquick.com if you want a truly independent search engine to go with the privacy features (their own indexer, no dependency on Google). Personally I enjoy the idea of getting Google results without the Google tracking for which I never signed an agreement.

In your examples you are not actually proving a negative (that something didn't happen). You are proving that something is not possible or could not have happened.


Possible or not possible are easy by comparison. Proving a negative means, "take this thing that really could have possibly happened, and prove that it didn't happen". A shape cannot both be a triangle and a square. A pure color at a single wavelength cannot both be red and blue. You are drastically underestimating the scope of how difficult it is to prove a negative. "This couldn't have happened because it is impossible" is actually a positive claim and as such, can be proven.

There's no reason the populace cannot both a) harden against as many security vulnerabilities as you reasonably can, and b) take back the political power from the ruling elite and institute oversight against massive surveillance and other governmental abuses, including severe criminal penalties against officials supporting them.

There certainly are countermeasures you can (and should) take, but generally, applying technical solutions to political and social problems doesn't work long-term.

Look, just because the guy was allegedly willing to kill someone in cold blood, that doesn't also mean he's willing to do something as drastic as infringe on anyone's intellectual property rights. I mean, let's be fair! There's no need to jump to such extreme conclusions.

Signed,
-- The RIAA/MPAA

What I call the genuine form of libertarianism (small 'l') is about maximizing personal freedom, in the "life, liberty, and property" sense. The basic idea is that my right to swing my hand ends at the tip of your nose. Adult people should be able to do whatever they want that does not infringe on the rights of others, and then reap the consequences. For example: if you can manage to responsibly use any drugs you like, you should be able to; if you drive impaired because you refuse to do it responsibly, society has a legitimate reason to apprehend and punish you. Someone else who thinks drug use is always a horrible practice is free to practice that belief by not doing it themselves, but has no legitimate justification for persecuting a responsible user.

Privacy should be this way: your choice. I'm in favor of strong privacy protections in law because right now there is not much choice in the matter. If I want the Googles of the world to have my information, it should be because I knowingly, personally, actively, and deliberately gave it to them myself. Anything less is an infringement of my privacy rights. There is a clear intent behind burying such things in Page Y of a legalese EULA and that intent is to make it as difficult as possible to exercise this choice. A device that transfers my data to someone else on my behalf, by default, without my actively configuring it that way, shows the same intent.

There is a movement or an effort, more prominent and vocal the last several years, to deliberately misrepresent that all libertarian thought is the same thing as anarcho-capitalism. Observe carefully and you'll find that most any idea that, if popular, would threaten the status quo has multitudes of deceptive propaganda-technique-using PR efforts directed against it, the goal of which is to tarnish that idea in the popular mind. Most liberterian philosophies have a concept of inalienable human rights and include the desire for a government, the main purpose of which is to protect those rights. Regulation of business is necessary because otherwise, corporations will use their intense concentrations of wealth, market power, and political clout to infringe on the rights of individuals. This is legitimate and not some kind of control-freak idea or Puritannical fantasy of telling others how to live. Anyone who is against it and represents themselves as the only libertarians in existence (and not a particularly extreme form) is lying to you, it's as simple as that.

Like the author Jeffrey Grupp explains, corporatism (as Mussolini called it) is the idea that the government, the major corporations, and the military function as one entity. It's always been this way since the kings of old; read up on the East India Company sometime. Eisenhower focused on the military and defense contract aspects and referred to it as the military-industrial complex. Sometimes it's called the military-industrial-media complex (so how 'bout those scary WMDs Iraq was supposedly threatening us with?). To focus on "government being evil" or "evil corporation" is a form of tunnel vision that denies the scope of the problem. It's one of those "pet causes" people get caught up in while nothing changes.

The problem with the marketing datamining is that many of these organizations are in bed with the government. There's a definite double standard here. If you hired someone to perform an illegal act on your behalf, both you and your hireling would be guilty of a crime. Yet somehow the government can pay companies for data that would be illegal for the government to directly collect itself and this is legal.

So if it were merely about trying to sell you "adult diapers" versus the regular kind, it would be more benign. At least in G. Gordon Liddy's day, surveillance was expensive, required a certain determination and commitment of resources, and consequently would only be done on targets considered important enough. With modern tech, the idea that "obviously I'm not interesting enough to spy on" is obsolete. This didn't happen though without plenty of support from government, media, marketers, and various other corporations all working towards their own common interests.

There is such a concept as aiding and abetting, or being an accessory to, a crime. Many people have been tried and convicted who themselves did not directly commit a crime.

If you don't believe that concept is applicable here, I'd like to know why. If someone else believes it does apply, I'd like to know their reasoning as well. I don't see how "liberal" or "conservative" has anything to do with it. It's a question of ethical responsibility, not political ideology. By failing to understand that, you're handwaving and dismissing a valid and worthy question about the nature of pervasive advertising and its effect on the population.