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?
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."
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?
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.
At the end of the day, at your company and at AdGuard's, it is only really one person's full time job to find this stuff. And your guy and AdGuard's guy are both reading the same garbage Twitter posts all day from the guy who's actually sourcing issues. Which he does for free because his particular malfunction is being really passionate about hating Google. And that's why we hear about FLEDGE.
This is tough. I think people want you to succeed. But I suspect the reason you didn't answer my question - why do you think you guys got raked over the coals for the Microsoft thing? - is, from your point of view, you probably think it's a smear campaign from Google, and your people have cautioned you that it sounds really conspiratorial and salty. Maybe it's true!
I can't imagine you're going to say "because Startpage is better" or "because the issues people complained about were substantive" (they weren't). And indeed, Google complains to the press about how you guys are like a mere fraction of their size, "down the street," and receiving so much intellectual attention and funding from the digerati despite having, essentially, a meaningless impact on anyone's use of the web. No offense. Like I said people want you to succeed.
But you have to do so without the sales pitch. Because it makes it sound like you'll do anything to survive, which may be good in the long term but is probably the real reason the Microsoft thing looks bad: It smelled desperate and unbecoming of someone entrusted to provide a privacy focused service.
And maybe you're going to do a full Justin Roiland and accuse everyone on the anonymous Internet forum of being totally lazy compared to you. You can be one of those "ra ra Elon Musk" people. Listen, you have no idea who writes these anonymous posts.
That said, I think the people who are talking about the censorship thing are morons and I wish you'd just focus on what I'm talking about here.
> 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.
It is certaintly feasible that a funded company has more time and resources to keep these lists up to date, as compared to community-maintained ones
