Of course it is. Google and Facebook have been pushing the bounds of privacy repeatedly over the years because it is in their financial best interest to do so.

Their primary product isn't search or communication or maps. Their product is plain and simple people's personal information. And, becuase they are a corporation in the USA they are legally bound to maximize shareholder value.

So, of course Google and Facebook have to erode the concept of online privacy. That is their product and that is the value that they are legally bound to maximize.

If they were very clear and up front about this issue, and communicated that information in plain language to their users that would be one thing. But, they don't.

Google doesn't every plainly say, "We track your location with your android phone. We track your searches on Google. We track what sites you visit though our advertising network. We track who you email when you use Gmail. If you use our calendar, we know what your schedule is. We track who you call when you use Google Voice. And, we want you to trust us to do the right thing with that data. We make a crap load of money using everything that we know about you to let other people sell stuff to you. Oh, and by the way, the government can have access to all that data without a search warrant."

So, yes, I do think the privacy issue is pretty important. You have a couple of massive corporations who are for all intents and purposes forced to erode people's concept of privacy. And, if people are going to compete with Google, one of the areas they are very vulnerable is in the area of privacy. Gabriel has been kicking their ass on this, and it's an area where they are vulnerable to competitors.

I say more power to DDG. It's a conversation that needs to be had, and more people need to know about this.

Can you point to a single instance where a company was forced to commit some act that its managers reasonably thought was morally wrong because of the "law" that companies must maximize shareholder value? Personally I think this trope has no basis in fact and cannot explain why Google or any other company is compelled to do things that are wrong.

There are many possible reasons why they would do something you disagree with: maybe they don't think it's wrong. Maybe they actively want to do something bad. Maybe you are not correct in your beliefs about what they are doing. But I think the reason you gave why they need to violate people's privacy is a cop out.

There are also a number of counter-examples where corporations fail to maximize shareholder profits by donating to charity, taking principled environmental stances, etc. I don't know how you or anyone could come to the conclusion that the U.S. legal system rigidly enforces absolute profit maximization.

> Oh, and by the way, the government can have access to all that data without a search warrant.

Don't know where you are getting this from.

Really? I'm surprised that you have a problem believing that people who manage companies might do things of dubious moral value in order to maximize profit. But, if you insist...

It could be easily argued that BP, Halliburton, et al... maximized shareholder value over environmental safety concerns.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill

The current recession is largely due to financial services companies creating derivatives out of sub prime mortgages. That is, bundling toxic debt and making it look like a AAA rated investment and selling it for profit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late-2000s_recession

Enron's "...reported financial condition was sustained substantially by institutionalized, systematic, and creatively planned accounting fraud, known as the "Enron scandal""

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron

Vioxx was a drug that I've seen people die from. It was pushed through the FDA approval process and then withdrawn after people started dying from it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rofecoxib

Classic example of corporations producing and selling a drug that was toxic, leading to thousands of horrible birth defects.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide

IBM made a lot of money selling automation systems so the Nazi's could efficiently kill millions in the Holocaust. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust Chiquita Brands has admitted to sponsoring terrorist organizations in Latin America

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doe_v._Chiquita_Brands_Internat...

> Oh, and by the way, the government can have access to all that data without a search warrant.

Don't know where you are getting this from.

Really??? If you insist...

"Under this program, referred to by the Bush administration as the "terrorist surveillance program", part of the broader President's Surveillance Program, the NSA is authorized by executive order to monitor, without search warrants, phone calls, e-mails, Internet activity, text messaging, and other communication involving any party believed by the NSA to be outside the U.S., even if the other end of the communication lies within the U.S." [1]

ref:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_co...

What you have failed to do is show any evidence at all that companies are legally obliged to be corrupt and greedy.

On your link about warrantless surveillance, scroll down to the long section on legal issues. While there is no question that the government asked for, and got, a lot of that information, the legality of the request is quite a different matter.

And now for the concrete counter-example, when the NSA asked for Qwest's cooperation, they didn't get it. This decision has materially affected Qwest's financials because they were shut out of a lucrative NSA contract.

Now show me the shareholder lawsuit against Qwest for failing to maximize shareholder value by refusing the NSA on this matter.

Your NSA link fails for two reasons. First, anyone can access your data without a search warrant if they do it illegally. It is deceptive to suggest that the USG can legally access your data without a search warrant. Second, as a technical matter, the USG can intercept communication between Google and you, but does not have access to Google's stored data. The concern is over the data that is going to be stored since obviously that communication between you and Google was going to happen anyway. DDG is no more safe from this attack surface than Google except inasmuch as they offer SSL search, which Google offers as well.

And, that pressure at times causes people within corporations to do actions of questionable morality.

I can point to companies that sell tainted drugs, products that contain lead paint, that dump toxic materials in rivers, do shoddy work on oil wells, etc. They don't do this because they are required to maximize shareholder value. They do it because of their pursuit of money. The difference isn't a meaningful one in my mind.

I think if the law was changed and companies were forced to consider societal interest then perhaps things would change for the better. Perhaps not. As it is, the law is a bad one in my opinion.

I provided examples of companies doing bad stuff in the pursuit of money. I opined that a change in the law is needed. The fact that companies doing bad stuff does not equal companies being legally required to bad stuff supports my position. That is, even though there is no law requiring companies to do bad stuff they still sometimes do. I suggested that a change in the law might lead to companies doing bad stuff less frequently.

Again, I don't understand the purpose of your post. Can you clarify?

As a technical matter, there are a number of ways that laws already require companies to consider the broad interests of society. Environmental regulations, taxes, tort law, and various other similar regulations, not to mention the natural pressure that the best interest of society tends to be somewhat compatible with profit, all influence companies to choose the option that is best for society as a whole most of the time. I wonder what specific law you are proposing when you say that laws should be changed to make companies consider the "societal interest."

Pointing out that companies doing bad things is not the same thing as legally requiring them to do bad things is a red herring. It's not germane to the discussion at hand.

"So, of course Google and Facebook have to erode the concept of online privacy [i.e. do bad things]. That is their product and that is the value that they are legally bound to maximize [i.e. the reason they must do bad things is because they are legally required to]."

That is what I was responding to when you responded to me. Since you are so mistaken about what exactly the discussion at hand is, I don't know how you can claim to know what is germane to it.

Pointing out that companies doing bad things is not the same thing as legally requiring them to do bad things is a red herring. It's not germane to the discussion at hand.

Prior to the release of the Ford Pinto, Ford's managers were fully aware of a design flaw in the Ford Pinto. As most people know, the gas tank on the car made the car explode in a ball of flames if it was involved in a rear end collision.

Ford's management compared the costs of a redesign to the costs associated with wrongful death lawsuits resulting from this design flaw. It was cheaper for them to pay the wrongful death lawsuits, so that's the decision that was made. It's very clear that this decision was made in an effort to maximize shareholder value, and did not take ethics into consideration whatsoever.

More information on this topic at the link below (Link is "Let Me Duck Duck Go That For You, since DDG is the primary topic of this thread):

http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=ford+pinto+lawsuits

Tobacco companies concealing evidence that nicotine is addictive is sort of the textbook case for this, though you are correct that it is not a law as such. Pretty much every corporation has in its charter a mandate to maximize shareholder value within certain constraints.

There is no legal "law" of such: it's an economic reality, however.

Since I don't have a Google account and ban many evil domain names such as googleanalytics.com, facebook.com, they can't track my information already. for me, there is no need to use a search engine with crappy user interface.

You may trust google with knowing that you searched for "naked bieber pics", but you may not want other websites also knowing your search habits.

In your (frankly terrifying) example, would the site have had to have ranked for "naked bieber pics", showing up in the results and then you click it to pull the search terms? Because that would seem to be pretty innocuous.

There's been various HN posts about how people circumvent browser privacy settings to track you across websites and even tricks such as generating an almost unique key by hashing together browser, fonts installed, IP address, etc.. I'm not sure of the current state of play in that war though.

I guess if you really don't want people to track private searches with your accounts, use a whole other browser where you're not logged into Google in incognito mode.

Edit: judging by the downvotes, I guess a good bunch of hackers like to live in atrocity!

Many people omit the word, "temporary". The suspicious part of me says they do it so their (mis-quoted) statement appears more bold and uncompromising.

Duck duck go actually redirects you in a way so that the referrer is not known to the site. They all think you came from duckduckgo.com. DDG also keeps no logs. Basically your own activity online cannot be used against you.

Now, privacy aside, I really like DDG for other reasons, like search relevance, continuous scrolling, zero-click info, etc. So its kind of win-win for me.

When this all started, no one envisioned ad networks and data companies aggregating all this personal information, or even that search terms would be a central part of the Internet.

So now that we know what is going on, why allow this personal information to leak? As far as I can tell, the only reason is so Webmasters can do better at Google SEO. And that reason can be wholly mitigated through the use of Google's Webmaster Tools.

No, Google's webmaster tools only provide a sampling of the data. We used to provide info for only 100 queries. Now we provide it for more queries, but it's still a sample: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/more-data...

Please don't make the argument that the data in our webmaster console is equivalent to the data that websites can currently find in their server logs, because that's not the case.

https://encrypted.google.com/

... or if you're super paranoid, disable sending referrer in your browser.

Source: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.http.sendSecureXSiteReferr...

Its silly to rely on trusting the search engine provider to be secure, better be secure on the client side.

I'm using it since years and I don't understand all that referrer-privacy hype. Just don't send the referrer.

For privacy reasons, I set it so it forges the referrer to be the root of the destination site if the domain is different too. So when I go to google.com and click on http://www.example.com/foo, the referer it sends is http://www.example.com/ instead of http://www.google.com/searchterm.

I haven't found any sites which this breaks yet...

You're entirely within legal rights to do this, of course. But if everyone did, then sites would have no idea where their traffic is coming from. Morally it is a bit questionable: your browser is blatantly and directly lying to www.example.com about how you got there.

http://www.google.com/privacy/ads/

If you don't want referral headers to be sent from one website to another, use HTTPS, or turn it off in your browser.

The best would be to just prevent ad networks from collecting this personal information altogether. The only reason I've heard against doing so is that webmasters need search terms for SEO, but they can get them via Webmaster tools.

Failing that, they could make a setting in the http version that turns off the headers. They could also make a setting that defaults to https. And they could make https easier to get to. Currently you can't even do https://google.com/ (you have to type in www.)

And so could Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, and Opera.

As others have mentioned, this is a good marketing move, but it's not clear to me that you actually care that much about this issue.

EDIT: It appears that at least one person disagrees with me. So, a quick question: Which takes more effort for the end user, switching to a new search engine or switching to https?

I can tell you that normal people who care also don't know about HTTPS or how to use it. I'm all for Google making it easier to do so, or otherwise stop this personal information from leaking. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2122431 for some ideas.

Also, FWIW, HTTPS alone doesn't solve the issue completely, as HTTPS->HTTPS traffic still leaks.

https://duckduckgo.com/fabric

It knows that fabric means something in textiles, geology, etc, and that it has multiple meanings in computing. To get Python, just click 'more meanings'

EDIT: I guess my point was already made, so in order to contribute something to the conversation, I'll add this: if there's anything wrong with your search result, you can just click the feedback button in the corner, explain what it is ('not showing official site for x', etc) and it gets fixed really fast.

Or better yet, search for "fabric python" and be done with it, no need for Google storing all your searches at the expense of you typing a few more characters once in a while.

It was result number 7 for me.

With the bangs and the zero-click duck aproaches what I think is a really good solution, for 'fabric' you get : http://duckduckgo.com/?q=fabric Which has in the zero click info all the meanings (including the python library), and if you would want python related results just do: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=python+fabric And it works beautifully...

I guess is a matter of how you are used to search

If I want information on the fabric python library I just search for "python fabric" - works on DuckDuckGo as noted above and also works just fine on Google.

Even if only to stay aware of where your sites (and those of clients) are going to be positioned when customers search for them.

Yes it is, if you're a political activist. Both Yahoo and Google have a proven history spying on people on behalf of government.

You should be taking issue with the governments demanding the records rather than expecting these companies to break the law on your behalf.

Don't focus on what nouns different parts of the spying apparatus choose to label themselves with, or what other functions they serve. Instead, consider their effects in the context of being a spying apparatus.

That's a really diluted standard for "spying".

The spies that saying warns of were not crawling around in vents with night vision goggles, they were your friends, neighbors, and coworkers who would relay semi-public information to a processing center that used the info towards harmful ends.

I see this situation as a direct analogue. We communicate naturally with a supposedly disinterested or trustworthy party, who then collects that information and distributes it to others, without our best interests in mind.

That being said, thinking they shouldn't be in a particular country which obligates them to do these things is a much more sound position than just saying they shouldn't follow the law in a few particular cases.

Ultimately, if you know they are operating in a country with a government which likes to do these sorts of things, caveat utilitor. (At least, try not to look so surprised when the police come knocking.)

And because of that I choose to use a 1-man search engine, without loss of quality, while gaining everything last bit of privacy.

And because of this, his stunt of a billboard ad is actually truthful.

The billboard is just noise and you are technically sophisticated enough to know better.

[citation needed]

"An Indian man is facing five years in jail for making an "offensive" comment [against Sonya Ghandi] after Google handed his personal data to local police."

http://www.v3.co.uk/vnunet/news/2217063/google-handing-user-...

Yahoo taken to task over China

http://www.boycottyahoo.com/yahoo_taken_to_task_over_china.h...

The personal data that is handed over is email address of the account. It's probably a privacy violation if it's really that hard to find out someone's email address once you know his social network account, but it's not spying on people.

Google's Orkut social networking site

Here is the same story on TechCrunch showing how Google provided more than just an email address:

The owner of the email id Rahul Vaid was traced, using information supplied by Google, to Chakarpur in Gurgaon city of Haryana.

http://techcrunch.com/2008/05/18/hit-pause-on-the-evil-butto...

That makes it even less sensible to call Google "spying" on people when one signup for Google's social network.

Will it necessarily mean better search results or will it mean that you will be subjected to personalized spam produced by those who game Google's system? I think history shows that there will be at least a little of the latter.

but, y'know, DuckDuckGo doesn't have to get the majority of people. with their incredibly low costs, if they can get their search market share to even 1%, they can be hugely profitable. and there are at least that many people who care.