Should I be worried about this development?
So far, I’ve tried Stract and 4get, and I’m not impressed with how limited they are - they’re not accurate, and no image and video search is what turns me away from them.
Metasearch engines like SearXNG aren’t that impressive, their results have too many filler results. My experience with manually tweaking their search also did not go well. Any alternatives with good defaults?
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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[Matrix/Element]Dead
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It will not share data about you until you specifically use the chat function. It’s on a different tab, like the image tab and the video tab.
And when you use it, it works as a privacy proxy, like piped and invidious does with youtube, or libreddit with reddit
I would not call that a “privacy proxy”, it is very disingenuous. It is a normal proxy, which replaces the technical metadata from your connection, so that automated tracking is harder. But it will not replace or remove any of your input. And you can easily be tracked that way too.
I use Andisearch, it’s AI, summarizing and explaining better than Perplexity and apart one of the most private search engine out there (active protection), anonymous use, no logs, no ads, no cookies, own reader mode of websites, embedded and sandboxed YT videos in the search result.
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Both yes and no. Usually, when I try to gather information, I prefer if there’s the option to access texts and videos at the same time. I did not realize how important it was, after I tried using Stract for almost two weeks. It is a minute inconvenience, and also that I don’t want to be restricted to a single platform.
AI doesn’t automatically equal not private. Its probably still has private as it was before.
Now if it starts showing it knows things about you, then I’ll be concerned.
If you click the Chat button on a DDG search page, it says:
So at minimum they are sharing data with one additional third party, either OpenAI or Anthropic depending on which model you choose.
OpenAI and Anthropic have similar terms and conditions for enterprise customers. They are not completely transparent and any given enterprise could have their own custom license terms, but my understanding is that they generally will not store queries or use them for training purposes. You’d better seek clarification from DDG. I was not able to find information on this in DDG’s privacy policy.
Obviously, this is not legal advice, and I do not speak for any of these companies. This is just my understanding based on the last time I looked over the OpenAI and Anthropic privacy policies, which was a few months ago.
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Thanks! I didn’t see that. Relevant bit for convenience:
Pretty standard stuff for such services in my experience.
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Important to differentiate in context learning and training.
Heh.
It may not be that simple though.
Chatgpt is licensing their product to lots of entities and then the licensees relabel the AI as their own with a line somewhere that says “powered by Chatgpt” or similar.
For example, Bing AI is just chatgpt-4.
So if DDG is simply licensing out chatgpt, id definitely have eprivacy concerns.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/try-duckduckgos-new-ai-feature-duckassist-now-for-free/
Article about DuckAssist. It is powered by an OpenAI product. It doesn’t do enough to bother me, and I can easily ignore it.
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I’d rather walk into my local library and ask my librarian for a prompt, then spend 3 hours searching an old encyclopedia for the answer, than ever resolving a domain owned by Brave. Thanks.
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Short answer: inserting affiliate links into results, and weird cryptocurrency stuff. https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-affiliate-links-crypto-privacy-ceo-apology
I don’t know if that’s “worse than Microsoft” because that’s a real high bar. But it’s different anyway.
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I’m not entirely clear on which (anti-)features are only in the browser vs in the web site as well. It sounds like they are steering people toward their commercial partners like Binance across the board.
Personally I find the cryptocurrency stuff off-putting in general. Not trying to push my opinion on you though. If you don’t object to any of that stuff, then as far as I know Brave is fine for you.
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The brave browser has AI already, it’s a matter of time until their search engine does too.
Frankly I trust duckduckgo more than brave with that data.
I also do not have any better suggestions.
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nuh uh
No thanks pass