"Out front, we find a grand, feelgood gloss, extending around us a warm hug of protection. But behind the curtain, it's just another cybertech company pimping us out to the preds."
Google Tag Manager hitting the firewall after Startpage Privacy Protection waved it through without even a cursory mention.
For years, we've been wondering whether the Startpage search engine might warrant a little more scrutiny. Whether the notion of "actual Google without the tracking" should perhaps be tentatively subjected to the old adage:
"If it sounds too good to be true... It probably is."
But Startpage's recent release of a so-called "privacy protection" extension for browsers, might just have burst the brand's carefully-cultivated integrity bubble for us.
Over the past few days, I've looked on in bewilderment as yet another new… ahem, "private" search engine entered the market. This one's called You.com, and it's an annoying, heavily-bankrolled spyware den with conditional access, forcible key-logging (i.e "search suggestions"), micro-monitoring of users' page actions, and in default mode, both Bing and Azure loading their trackers on the page. Yet people have taken the brand's "private" headline seriously, and the buzz appears to be flying - much to the frustration of one or two long-established rivals.
I was wondering how comical the privacy-washing genre would have to become before the first wave of privacy brands started grumbling…
"Mozilla has become the corporate version of your local pub's self-styled "nice guy". Spends all his time trying to drape himself in virtuous veneer, but the harder he tries, the emptier the pub gets."
Let's face it. The Mozilla story is now in its pre-meltdown phase. I reckon we're about two chapters away from the scene where all the toys start flying out of the pram and former allies are roundly lambasted for choosing better browsers. Okay, maybe just one chapter. When Mozilla hits the buffers at Bigtime Central station, we can make one pretty safe bet… The blame will, as far as Mozilla is concerned, rest with everyone but Mozilla.
"The Search Engine That Gives Metaverse Faceware To Deplatformed Conspiracy Theorists offers great privacy, and will not share your personal information with ANYONE outside the boundaries of our beautiful, pancake-flat Planet Earth."
So, you saw the title, and you liked the look of the title. But if you were expecting a smorgasbord of brilliant new technical ideas, well… I am spectactularly sorry, but we now live in a reality where search engine concepts are ethical - not technical. You may indeed have noticed an almost obligatory trend among newer search engines, in which the product is summarised with a wonderfully ethical one-liner…
"In the long run, there's only so much mileage in these brands persistently directing the public's thoughts towards what is actually, in truth, their products' worst attribute."
In Bodhi Linux, Vivaldi 4.3 forced direct connections to certificate authority domains before allowing visits to encrypted pages.
The privacy bandwagon is in town, and the cart is pretty crowded as it rounds the corner onto High Street. As each jostling brand throws its surface-scrubbed privacy parcels out to the roadside gathering with gleeful abandon, open hands grab at the shower of generous gifts.
The public broadly accepts cybertech's privacy claims at face value, and this has created a digital Gold Rush, in which all manner of companies wave brightly-decorated incognito masks at Google's userbase, in the hope of enticing a lucrative mass exodus. But when Google's users jump across into this wonderful new world of incognito, it slowly dawns on them that Google has made the jump too - in an incognito mask of its own.
"Corporate spying, at the level it's now reached, is creepy, stalkerish, manipulative, predatory, warped, perverted, and abusive of human rights. Even if it carries no demonstrable collateral harm, you don't need to feel it's something you should willingly and happily accept."
The easy way to write a post about online privacy would be to list a range of so-called “privacy respecting” alternatives to Big Tech. But it's become increasingly obvious that at least some of these alternatives are a far cry from what they claim to be, and are actually part of the very system they profess to oppose.
At best, simply trusting services because their marketing says “we're all about your privacy”, when some of the worst privacy policies in the world open with “Your privacy is important to us”, is a wildly superficial and somewhat naïve approach.
The true key to optimising online privacy lies in disrupting the core tenets of tracking. Tenets as simple as product allegiance, for example. By sticking with one brand, one browser, one login, we make ourselves frightfully easy to monitor. Whilst, say, a VPN is touted as a route to better privacy, it allows a single provider to log the entirety of a user's online activity. And there's nothing other than that provider's word to say that the available information will not be packaged and sold to the Great Inscrutables.
"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.
"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."
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?
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?
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…
"That puts DuckDuckGo in the company of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Cloudflare, Megaupload, and wait for it... Pornhub. That is the general ethical standard we are talking about."
In the digital backwater that is alternative social media, we've come to expect a timeline punctuated with animated cries of “ditch Google!”. But ask for a rationale, and the orator will routinely point a nifty hyperlink at a piece of content marketing. A comprehensive damnation of Big Tech, fused with an all-important alternative recommendation. A slick word-parcel that either emerged directly from the lips of Eth Tech, or looks like it was financed with an Eth Tech backhander. So, what the heck is Eth Tech? You ask.
In the last week, Brave - the browser provider - announced a buyout of a low-profile search engine called Tailcat, and a plan to integrate it into the Brave brand. We might expect that to raise a few groans of: “Oh please, not another 'private search engine'”, but this one genuinely does look different, and I think it's a really exciting development.
It's always the same. When people become disillusioned with a social networking platform, they start looking at alternative social networks. Gripes with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have driven a huge rise in alt social memberships, resulting in accelerated sign-ups to the likes of MeWe and Parler.
Further disgruntlement has pushed an increasing volume of people towards the Fediverse, which incorporates alternatives to Twitter (Mastodon / diaspora* / Pleroma), Facebook (Friendica), and Instagram (Pixelfed). And whilst it would be ridiculous to compare these modestly-inhabited backwaters with the bustle of the major platforms, they do show just how heavily we've been brainwashed into believing we have to use some form of social media. We will accept worse and worse deals, just to avoid dropping out of the social networking sphere altogether…
