Hacker News Reader

Comment by axod | Hacker News Reader

I really don't understand the strategy here. DDG Seems to be entirely targeted towards people who want to be ultra secretive about what they're searching for. People looking for kiddieporn? Terrorists? Who are the users here?

I'm not being negative here, I just have no idea what 'problem' is trying to be solved here.

View on HN

It's not a strategy, just good policy.

Why?

What about when your service is used exclusively by law breakers? Will anonymity be a great policy then?

I think it's creepy that lots of random people can see what you're doing on the Internet, nefarious stuff or not. So I see enabling privacy wherever possible as a step in the right direction, regardless if it attracts users or not. In this case, I didn't think too hard about it. James proposed the idea a few days ago. I looked into it and set it up yesterday, and announced this morning.

As for the service being used exclusively by law breakers, I think that hypothetical is far-fetched. DDG has plenty of users now that don't care much about privacy, and I don't think most Tor users are law breakers. So I see this whole line of reasoning as a non-issue.

Well, good luck as always... Just remember what happened to Reddit.

"What about when your restaurant is frequented entirely by murderers? Will steak knives be good utensils then?"

That's a very very poor analogy.

Advertising your service as an untraceable anonymous service, is attractive to certain groups of people. A large amount of those are going to be engaging in unlawful activities.

The analogy would be advertising your restaurant as one in which you are permitted to enter wearing full body disguises and helped with your exit through various escape routes. The restaurant owners will provide gloves for you, remove any traces of your DNA, etc.

Don't you think such a restaurant would then be used by murderers?

I would agree with your analogy in that an 'anonymous restaurant', where you are granted complete anonymity whilst inside, would also be a recipe for disaster.

You kinda forgot the 'anonymity' bit in your analogy though... Convenient ;)

There are plenty of good people out there who need anonymity. People whos lives depend on it. Just because you don't need anonymity doesn't mean you should deprive everyone else of it.

Talk about niche markets...

Not sure what your point is. How many users does a non profit service need before it's no longer niche and worth pursuing? Even if Tor only had 100 users who were safer for it, I'd say it was worth it.

There are many unjust laws, especially in countries other than the US.

Each of us has a right to privacy. This allows for nefarious activities but it also enables many forms of creativity.

Privacy = good

Anonymity = bad

Just my 2c.

If you want upvotes, please explain why you think this.

Who is "jrockway"? Why would being more anonymous or less anonymous make my comments more or less useful or interesting?

If anonymity is bad, why do you use a nickname here?

If anonymity isn't an issue, lets just get rid of the nicknames altogether and turn into 4chan.

Once you allow anonymity, you also allow impersonation, endless trolling, abuse, etc etc.

Anonymity is hardly necessary to hassle or troll (or even impersonate) people.

You're seriously suggesting HN users can't work out the difference between an 'o' and a '0'? I'd credit them with slightly more intelligence than that.

No, but they can't tell the difference in axоd. (The о there is the Cyrillic lookalike.)

It's a moot point. The nickname is different, and can be proven to be.

how can you have privacy without anonymity from your information service providers?

Just because something is illegal doesn't mean you want everyone to know about it. Do you want your ISP to read your email with your girlfriend? Do you want Google to know about your medical conditions?

Information is power; the less you give to other people, the more power you have over your own life. Why let your ISP and search engine learn more about you than they need to know?

DDG is targeting itself to tech-savvy people that don't feel like leaking their entire life to the Internet. The Tor relay helps this marketing goal.

>> "DDG is targeting itself to tech-savvy people that don't feel like leaking their entire life to the Internet."

The parallels with Reddit are certainly there I hope you can appreciate. I'm not saying it's completely the wrong strategy, but it's certainly not the one I'd choose.

The users probably include democracy activists struggling against dictatorships. You know, people of higher moral caliber than your average child molester.

Exactly. See https://www.torproject.org/torusers.html.en for a list of the type of people who use Tor:

That is a list of people the tor project would like to use it. In my limited experience, that does not mesh in any way with those that actually do use it.

You don't even know what 1% of the people who use Tor, use it for.

You're right. I only know what the other 99% use it for.

You know, you're acting like a dick all over this thread.

In other words, people conducting illegal activity.

If you are like me and use Google all the day (without giving much thought to the fact that you are logged in, e.g. via gmail), it can be pretty scary to take a look at https://www.google.com/history/

Total Google searches: 21717

None of these searches are in the categories you mention, but I bet you can still make up some interesting statistics about me.

So why not just disable web history?

... and why would making up some statistics about you be scary? They might be able to show you relevant advertising???? OH NOES!

Our research shows that all child molesters search for these 7 items. We randomly selected you for a quick search of your 20k search terms and found all 7 (separated by years but we decided that was irrelevant).

Since we have a "zero tolerance" policy when it comes to child molesters ("zero tolerance" meaning "guilty until proved innocent") we are accusing you of this crime (and telling your workplace and all of your acquaintances).

You may now use whatever meager life-savings you might have to defend yourself against these charges. This should not take long as you are also now friendless and out of work.

Have a nice day.

The problem that privacy is not a standard online.

and the solution is, 99.999% of people don't care.

Your viewpoint seems to be that those who do care must be have a malicious intent. I don't and I know of many others who don't. So you are ranting into nirvana, really.

My original point was that I don't understand the stratgey of pandering to a very small niche market, that is notoriously impossible to monetize (see Reddit).

Anyway, seems my views are falling on deaf ears.

People sometimes do things for reasons other than making money.

Except DDG has features other than a good privacy policy, so he's not just marketing to what you suppose to be a niche market - he's just adding them to his target market.

Really? Why are people so upset with Facebook oversharing, then?

Maybe people really do care about their privacy. Everyone has that stalker ex that they want to avoid.

It seems that many people who are "outraged" in reality stay on Facebook anyway because they really don't want to quit. Witness Facebook's ever-climbing popularity and the failure of all the "Quit Facebook Day" protests etc. to be a success. This reminds me of the threats many people made to move from the USA to Canada if Bush Jr. were re-elected...if you know people who said that, I'm guessing they stayed put (the people I know certainly did).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com