DuckDuckGo Gets BLOCKED by Privacy Protection Routine

"Unlike when you load other “private search engine” homepages, you're not alone with DuckDuckGo. You're actually connecting to the Microsoft cloud hosting service... And that means Microsoft knows both who you are, and what you searched for. Oh dear..."

If you read my posts regularly, you'll know the issue that prompted the title of this post would have come as no surprise to me. But it's finally happened. DuckDuckGo - the search engine that presents itself as a paragon of privacy - has been blocked by a Firefox browser extension designed to protect users from the grip of the big six megatrackers. Namely: Amazon, Apple, Cloudflare, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. And as regular readers will have guessed, the megatracker responsible for DuckDuckGo's blocking, is Microsoft.

Big Silence: What “Privacy Respecting” Services DON'T Tell You About Their Data Handling Continuum

"This contradiction, enabled by a loophole in data protection law, allows “ethical tech” companies to be considerably LESS transparent about the entirety of the data-handling continuum than “big tech” companies."

Image by Bob Leggitt @ Planet Botch

It's a wonderful development that more people are starting to care about and reject aggressive surveillance, as they steadily recognise the very real societal rot that unrestrained corporate spying and monitoring can cause.

Surveillance fears ultimately stifle freedom, and in some areas reduce public safety. We might be less likely to upload a profile picture online because of face recognition tracking in the offline world. We might limit our learning because we fear the consequences of searching for information on sensitive subjects. We might even decline to visit a doctor for an embarrassing or stigmatised physical or mental condition, because of the sharp rise in health service data-sharing with inscrutable private companies.

Simultaneously, we're at higher risk of indentity fraud, as surveillance giants like Facebook warrant themselves more and more personal data, whilst increasingly displaying a "shit happens" attitude to being hacked.

For the sake of freedom and safety, we desperately need an alternative to surveillance-crazed tech, but do we really have one?

Brave Search: Industry Revolution or Ad Bar in a Face Mask?

"Depending on what you search for, you may in fact be getting 100% of the results sourced from Google."

Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash (image modified)

It's been heralded as game-changing in that it headlined its post-intro fanfare with a non-Google, non-Microsoft search index. But now that it's made its beta version public, does Brave Search look like the wise choice it promised to be in the pre-launch posturing? Is this a revolution in web search, or is it basically a 2008 ad bar in a face mask?

One of the problems with the discourse about privacy is that we can get so focused on who is or isn't getting their hands on our data, that we lose sight of the bigger issue. Namely, the corruption of information integrity that advertising companies have a lucrative incentive to engineer. And one of the problems with Brave is that however much it screams the word “privacy” into our faces, it's still an advertising company, whose primary goal is to show us ads. Just like Google. Just like Facebook. The methods and data-gobbling capacity may be different, but the funding still comes from people whose only concern is that we buy their shit.

So there are really three questions hovering over Brave Search.

1. Is it what we thought it would be?

2. Given that user privacy and online commerce roundly detest each other, does it really offer good privacy?

3. How much does the company's advertising focus interfere with the integrity of the results?

Why I Uninstalled Brave Browser

"The company knows those megatrackers shouldn't be there. It's already evolving from privacy by default to privacy for sale."

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash (image modified)

I've split up with my browser… No, it's okay, I'm fine… I'm picking up the pieces. I mean, obviously, you don't end a relationship without some personal impact, but… No honestly I'm fine… I really just don't wanna talk about it… Well, except to say…

Why Social Media Should Shadowban All Gated Content Links

"If 'activism' disappears behind a paywall and you still think it's activism, never submit to the temptation to take an IQ test."

Photo by FLY:D on Unsplash

“Annoying”, “infuriating”, “irate”… Just some of the language that's regularly used with regard to the discovery of gated content at the dark end of a social media link. Links to content that the vast majority of people can't access have now reached spam-wave volume on social platforms, as money-focused publishers line up to cash in on the lucrative new craze.

The practice has generally slipped through the spam net so far, but an ever-rising proliferation of what to most people are dead links, makes for an extremely poor user-experience on the Social Web. And worse, the inaccessibility of the content is promoting the spread of misinformation, as wildly exaggerated, trickbait titles become “reference works” in themselves, without the tempering effect of body text.