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by weinzierl
1527 days ago
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I'm using DuckDuckGo almost exclusively[1] for years now and I'm pretty happy with it. I don't see much benefit in their browser though. I think their "Privacy Grade", which is shown very prominently in the browser UI, is more harm than help. It is much too strict and rating everything down is counter to their intention. Is a B site still OK? What about a C, or. B+? If nothing is A, this is just confusing to the user. Is there any website, except duckduckgo.com itself, that has an A rating? Why has a perfectly legit site like Wikipedia only a B rating? Ironically even the service they use to rate terms of service (https://tosdr.org/) only has a rating of B+, because of "Unknown Privacy Practices" in their very own terms of service. [1] The only exception being local searches. |
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As to what is going on with privacy grades more generally, we never felt comfortable rating a site an A if we couldn't assess their privacy policy, since they could be doing very nefarious things (e.g., selling your data). We tried to work with groups to get more assessments on more sites, but never found a scalable way to do this. We even licensed various ML analysis algorithms for privacy policies, but always found significant issues with them. In the end, I think this stems from the fact that privacy policies themselves are too vague.