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Comment by spupe | Hacker News Reader

When these things come up I always wonder, why do we believe what these services promise? For example, Duckduckgo is listed here and pretty much everywhere else as the best search engine for privacy, because they have a stated no-log policy. But there are no audits, and as far as I know we have no independent confirmation of this at all.

I find it odd because when it comes to VPNs, there are independent audits and other measures, such as hosting in non-compliant countries such as Switzerland, that at least add some level of evidence behind a company's claims.

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I don't "believe" any of them. My use of other services rather than staying on The Google reservation is because it's always better to not put all your eggs in one basket; The Google can clobber your entire digital life out of nowhere and with little to no recourse. Although you know for a fact that Google has all your data and records everything you do, at least there's a chance with other smaller services that they are either keeping their word or are out of the jurisdiction of your particular law enforcement agency.

At the end of the day, there's no absolute trust towards any of them. When I'm on the internet, I'm assuming that someone with enough motivation can eventually get my data. Instead of rolling over and submitting to The Google, I at least enjoy forcing my potential enemies to go through a more complicated obstacle course.

> why do we believe what these services promise?

We don't, but we also don't use DuckDuckGo's products as the recovery email for hundreds of online services, as a tool to share and store team spreadsheets or as a storage for all of our pictures, or as a tracker that monitors our location 24/7.

So the worst they could do is spy on our search, they can't track everything we do with the hanging threat of destroying our entire digital life if we do something that its IA deems unacceptable.

DDG says explicitly:

"We also save searches" in their https://duckduckgo.com/privacy policy

Some queries will always be "personally identifiable" such as your name, ssn, telephone number or an IP address lookup or an address or GPS coordinates, etc.

Bingo.

Someone might hear ‘no tracking’ and think ‘privacy’, and they might be right in making the connection, but DDG never promises not to save some details about your searches. They just don’t serve up ads which are based on your browsing habits.

I still use them because this makes their operation way less perverted than Google’s in my opinion. That, and having (IMO) better search results which aren’t SEO’d to death, make it stand apart from Google Search in my view.

Over a number of years I have switched over from Google-everything to having a number of different accounts for different services, including paid email and domain registration. I wonder how a paid search engine would go in this world? - for now there are excellent search engines like DDG which are free, but I wonder how much a subscription for ad-free searching would cost?

True, but even then if the provider has some secret agreement with a government agency, you really have no way to trust a VPN provider. I'm also guessing that VPN providers are high priority for government agencies to find vulnerabilities that provides them access.

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