Technology Review: Blogs: Guest Blog: Privacy-Protecting Search Engine Challenges Google

Google, a company with 20,000 employees and $24 billion in revenue in 2009, is being challenged--by a guy in Philadelphia.

Gabriel Weinberg is the coder behind Duck Duck Go. It's a search engine that is profoundly--some might say radically--private. Unlike Google, it doesn't build a user profile for you, store your IP address, or collect any other information that could ever tie a particular search to you.

That makes it impossible, for example, for a future more-evil version of Weinberg (or his company, were someone to buy it) to exploit that data by selling it to advertisers without your permission (as Digg, MySpace, Facebook, and others have done). Or for the company to accidentally make search data public so that someone can connect whole strings of searches to the individuals who conducted them (as was done with AOL data in 2006). Or for a more intrusive U.S. or foreign government to successfully subpoena your search history.

Better yet, as of a few days ago, Duck Duck Go searches plug a gaping security hole few users have ever thought of--the fact that every time you conduct a search on Google, your search terms are passed to the site(s) you click on after conducting that search.

To understand why that's important, Google something you'd rather was kept private, and click on the top search result. Now the webmaster of that site has both the terms you used to find that site and your IP address. As the RIAA has illustrated, this is another way to identify you directly.

Of course, what's a search engine worth if it doesn't give useful results? Surprisingly, considering its (so far) modest scope, this is an area where Duck Duck Go also shines. Apparently, one of the forces that motivated Weinberg to build it was the creeping ascendancy of spammy pseudo-content on Google. Duck Duck Go feels like a more-cultivated version of the web--fast, informative results without all the dross.

While it has its own web crawler and web index, Duck Duck Go also pulls results from Microsoft's Bing and Yahoo's BOSS search APIs, so a lot of what you're getting are results you could find on those search engines, anyway. What sets DDG apart, however, is the way those results are parsed, re-ordered, and displayed on a page that feels like it was built by a designer instead of an ubernerd. In other words, in some ways it's a better user experience, and with an array of customizations sure to please the internet-savvy designer / hacker / open source geek that are sure to be its early adopters.

Its search rendered friendly and usable again--and most importantly, totally private. After all, your web browser has an anonymous / incognito mode--shouldn't your search engine have one too?

via technologyreview.com

Posted via email from Ali Nabavi's posterous

Facebook: privacy and permissions

I don't really know all of the details about Facebook's most recent changes to privacy management.  I do know that they added several new features since I last attempted to configure all of my privacy and sharing settings.  One of those is being able to selectively deny content to a dynamic group.  This is possible through Facebook friend lists.

So, here's my own scenario:

I started out on Facebook by inviting my closest friends, i.e. annoying them with even more social networking spam.  YEARS LATER, most of them joined Facebook.  :-)  Once Facebook really caught on with the general Web-surfing public, all kinds of people were sending me friend requests.  I was sending friend requests to all kinds of people.  As a result, I ended up with a wide variety of relationships represented in my Facebook friends pool.

The more Facebook became a common means of communicating with people, I had to rethink what I was sharing with whom, or what I was posting on Facebook.  As a result, I narrowed the range of content that I posted.  While this might be a good idea anyway, so as not to offend and alienate every person I know (that sees my Facebook posts), I didn't like the idea of Facebook only serving as a means to share a particular grade of information with a particular grade of friend, deferring to the lowest common denominator.  "It's sunny here today.  :-)"  How enthralling!  "I like everyone.  :-)"  "I'm in no way offensive, Boss/Co-worker/Gossiping Office-Mate,  :-)"

The clearest way I could segregate people, my own litmus test, when necessary was to have a group called "f**k" -- that's the F word, kids -- or, if necessary, a group called "no f**k".  Into the former, I would put people I could use the F word with -- an indicator of familiarity and trust.  :-)  Into the latter, the people with whom I did not feel I could or should use the F word with.  Now, more descriptive, perhaps, I just created a Facebook friend list called "squares & oppressors" into with I piled an assortment of professional contacts and barely-friends.  (I'm confident that my family members have endured enough tribulations in life that some printed words are insufficient cause for them to un-friend me on Facebook.)

So, that was the biggest thing I did recently.  I went through my friends and added them to a list that I could safely remove from my circle of trust without fear that they would never get to know the real me.  Of course, once I created the list I then had to do something with it.  This is basically what I did:

• Went to http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy.
• Clicked through each item with sharing options, i.e., displayed something like "Everyone", or "Shared with", or "Only friends", etc.
• Selected the last item in the menu, "Customize".
• In the area called "Make this visible to" I selected "Only friends" and deselected all of my networks, or selected "None of my networks".  (I didn't select "Friends of friends" because many of my coworkers I wanted to protect from my life's true nature are also friends of friends.)
• In the area called "Hide this from" I typed in the name of the friend list I made, called "squares & oppressors".
• Went to http://www.facebook.com/editapps.php?v=allowed and repeated the above steps for each link called "Edit Settings".  Some of the applications don't post or share information so they won't have fields you need to change.

Now I can go to Facebook and post the F word all day!

Now, of course, the settings I described above hide all of your shared content from the same group of people, the squares and the oppressors.  You can change those to suit your needs.  For now, I'm content with having two groups of friends on Facebook: one group that sees everything I do and another that just knows that I exist and can send messages to me and probably thinks I'm extremely boring or private.

Please let me know if you have any advice!  I'd love to make Facebook even more complicated to use responsibly.

Posted via email from Ali Nabavi's posterous