I've eventually settled on using fastmail and their masked email feature which can create addresses on my own domain for this. I love DDG and appreciate anyone helping in this space to make email more manageable but I assume these addresses will be quickly blocked from many services just like the firefox relay addresses are.
I wish there was a way for these relay services to be effective since they are much, much easier to get someone to use than telling them to just up and move from gmail to fastmail.
Just in case you happen to be a 1Password user as well, there is an integration where they can auto-generate masked emails for you: https://support.1password.com/fastmail/ It makes it very convenient!
Auto-generated masked emails using Fastmail and 1Password has worked very well for me when I'm using Firefox, with the 1Password extension installed, on my laptop.
I can't for the life of me, however, figure out how to get 1Password to auto-gen a masked email from their iPhone app or desktop app.
You can also use a custom domain (and/or anything else Fastmail lets you choose), this way you can put all the randomly generated emails coming to you in a single folder (as a rule).
I've heard of fastmail in years past. Your comment got me curious again about it. How's the deliverability of their service? I guess with anything "email related", the hardest part is making sure that the emails I send actually ends up where I intend to go. (Goes without saying, outbound emails are NOT spam but legitimate emails.)
I’ve never had any deliverability issues with Fastmail and am happy with their uptime. I originally used google apps (aka gsuite/workspaces these days) but had enough headaches using it for personal email that I switched and the quality of service feels the same to me.
I was a paid Fastmail user for something like 3 or 4 years, largely as a consequence of the good standing they seemed to have among the audience on HN. Deliverability (and uptime) with Fastmail is excellent.
However, during that time I filed two support tickets and neither left me feeling particularly warm and fuzzy about the faces behind the business that I was pledging my annual subscription to. The response in the latter instance in fact was so bad that it's what motivated me to look elsewhere rather than renew. I was prepared to pay more just to know that I wasn't doing business with bullies/jerks. I ended up going with a smaller provider. Without checking, my annual expenses are actually around half as much, IIRC.
Are you worried that a smaller provider may be less reliable in the long run, or you are already prepared to just switch your domain again if it becomes an issue? If you are ok sharing it, what is the provider?
I really wanted to switch to Fastmail a few years back but 1) its registration page was intermittently down for me and 2) when I caught it during uptime, it sent me to phone SMS verification which I found invasive given it is a paid service. I was ready to give it a chance anyway, but no SMS got delivered to me in the end.
"Smaller" in this case just means smaller, not newer. They've been in business for a long time, and I expect them to be around for a while. The downsides tend to be in the opposite direction: they're old, and their webmail/account management interface until recently showed its age. This was not a problem in my book; I don't use webmail. The greater concern with mail providers involves the risk that they would pull something like what Gmail did and withdraw from offering standards-based email (i.e. no more IMAP). In that respect, what the sluggishness to get with the trends really means is a lower risk rate of churn, and I'm happy with that.
Your profile doesn't list a way to contact you privately.
As of last year, it's supposed to be one of the services listed on <https://www.fsf.org/resources/webmail-systems>, but it's not. I just reached out to Greg Farough to follow up on why.
Thanks, that FSF link might be good enough. (I don't want to identify this account and don't immediately know how to set up an anonymous throwaway email)
By the way, according to my Mail's connection doctor on mac, it appears to use IMAP when talking to gmail as of now. I wasn't aware Google was phasing out proper IMAP support, my concern was more about them being known to ban accounts with little recourse.
I’m always interested in discovering paid service email providers who respect privacy. Could you please email me the provider name/URL on my temp email listed on my profile? Thanks.
Fastmail is awesome. I'd combine DDG Email with their Masked Email in the cases where you want to strip image tracking and opaque tracking urls from your links.
The concept is great, and compared to other companies, i trust duckduckgo more...but, there still a for-profit company (nothing wrong with that)...so how will they sustain this? Maybe i'm not so smart with funding models, but i would feel better if there was some sort of pricing...to make me feel like as a user i'm not the product...am i paranoid for being suspicious?
I wonder how the privacy aspects of this compare to Firefox Relay?
Having used Firefox Relay a bit, I'm pretty happy with it but the free tier is relatively limited. DDG email seems to allow unlimited addresses but after a quick look it's not obvious that you can turn them off if an account is getting too much spam.
DuckDuckGo's search manipulation is just no different to Google's since essentially they are using Microsoft Bing's search results. [0] So the manipulation, down-ranking and censoring of search results was inevitable with tons of evidence of this: [1][2][3][4]
"At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation.": [1]
At this point, DDG is a front for Microsoft using 'privacy' buzzwords. Might as well use Brave Search then.
> In addition to down-ranking sites associated with disinformation, we also often place news modules and information boxes at the top of DuckDuckGo search results (where they are seen and clicked the most) to highlight quality information for rapidly unfolding topics.
During the Russia / Ukraine conflict the Duck Duck Go founder decided to filter out any results which are deemed as Russian misinformation. Censorship of any kind, is always still in the end, censorship.
This is the gist of what everyone is upset about, of those who are upset. The entire point of DDG was that the search results were never to be tampered with for personalization reasons, censoring results due to political reasons seems to be a slippery slope.
"The entire point of Company was ABC, doing 867 seems to be a slippery slope." Huh?
I don't see how capturing personal information from users for any reason has anything whatsoever to do with omitting perceived misinformation from all users across the board. One can agree or disagree with the decision, but they are two entirely different issues in entirely different areas, and one is in no way a "slippery slope" toward the other.
Censorship is always censorship, yes, and naivite is always naivite. Meet the tolerance paradox!
Also, search engines have _as their sole purpose_ sorting their list of links by some measure of quality. Removing useless nonsense is what we go there for.
I’m the founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo. We are not (and never were) censoring results. I realize I caused the misunderstanding due to own my unfortunate phrasing in a tweet, and since then, how our news results rankings work has been highly misinterpreted.
We (DuckDuckGo) subsequently made a help page to explain it in detail: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne... Tl;dr: we don’t censor, we don’t move things so far down that they are effectively censored, we don't evaluate individual stories or narratives for "truth", and we don’t rank based on any political agenda or opinions. This is just a summary though so would read the help page for details.
I also put out a clarification thread about misconceptions that included this topic amongst others (like the fact that no, we’re not owned by Google), but the help page referenced above is the best and most thorough explanation of our news rankings. https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1515635886855233537
Who yegg is is well known on HN, but you yourself are anonymous so it's a bit weird to see this exchange. Maybe (1) click on the name of the person before asking them who they are and (2) flesh out your profile to return the favor?
Its not the results I'm worried about with DDG, after all you just use bing behind the scenes although I think there's some shenanigans there too.
It's your deep financial ties to Microsoft that's worrying. And it seems you're willing to turn your back on privacy/tracking for your friends when Microsoft asks.
As for our private search engine, it is in actually way more than Bing at this point. We have approximately a millions lines of search code at this point, many tens of millions of dollars invested in them and a staff of about 200.
Please let me pay for this service. It looks worth having and: 1) I'd like to know that it is funded by users, rather than advertisers and thus can resist privacy invasion presuures. 2) I'd like to have some basis for belief that it will be around longer than it takes the VC money to run out, (or the marketing budget, or whatever non-sustainable pot it comes from).
DuckDuckGo has been profitable since 2014 through private search ads, and our company is not controlled or beholden to venture capital (or VC or other money).
Our product vision is an "easy button" for privacy, an all-in-one privacy app. Email protection is part of that, along with search, browsing, etc. Put another way, we see email protection as part of our core product, and within our app we autofill duck addresses in email forms.
We will take your comment into consideration, though we prefer free services where possible so more people can get privacy protection, which is in line with our mission. This service comes with it a set of privacy guarantees here: https://duckduckgo.com/email/privacy-guarantees and we will not be putting ads on it.
I can't speak for their circumstances, but I'd assume a VC-backed company describing themselves as "not beholden" to VCs means they're default alive without additional fundraising, and that they haven't given over majority control of the board to their investors.
This answers the VC money fear, but not everything else OP brought up.
If a product is subsidized by a company's other products, it's hard for me to believe it'll be around forever. For an email product, that's a huge problem, because I use my address in hundreds of contexts that take a long time to identify and migrate, much longer than a typical company's sunsetting notice.
EDIT: The parent comment was edited to note that they perceive DDG Email as part of the core product, not a separate product. That's helpful to know, but I'm still skeptical that that's sustainable in the long term. This would not be the first time a feature was cut from a product because it was too expensive to maintain. I'll be waiting to see their unified privacy solution really take off before I place any bets on this feature.
The business case seems pretty obvious: They're using this as a way of getting people to install a browser extension / app, and changing their default search engine. A search user is valuable, which makes customer acquisition expensive. This also makes their extension way more sticky.
Just because you're a product doesn't mean the service is not sustainable. It should be very easy for them to figure out whether the feature is profitable or not compared to other acquisition methods.
Perhaps for them it's a loss leader, but for someone using this to sign up to stuff.. I would like to use this for almost all services but given the business model here I would be uncomfortable using this beyond the more spammy stuff (not that that's not useful!)
Fastmail’s email servers are in the US and the company is in Australia. Both are in the five eyes jurisdictions, plus Australia has some draconian laws (see Assistance and Access Bill, though email itself is generally not a secure enough channel). ProtonMail is in Switzerland, which is better surveillance-wise, but it still complies (as one would expect a company to) with court orders and has disclosed the IP address of an activist due to a court order.
Fastmail supports IMAP, which means you can use any email client on a desktop or phone. ProtonMail does not support IMAP directly on desktops and requires a “bridge application” for IMAP. This is provided for paying customers. ProtonMail does not have any support for IMAP on smartphones, where you’re either left to using the browser or using the ProtonMail app.
I love that DuckDuckGo is based in Paoli. Grew up in the area and it's crazy to think there's an innovative tech company in a sleepy Philly suburb haha. Keep up the great work!
In terms of value to the end user, and a mission of expanding privacy-improving practices through their services, I can see why a feature like email protection would be prioritized over a proprietary index.
While one may marginally improve some aspects of the service and has strategic value, the other actually moves the needle in terms of an end-user's overall privacy.
What’s the point of email forwarding for a search engine that no longer has an index? Licensing Bing results is all of DDG business but a rounding error for Microsoft. That’s a very precarious positron to be in.
Email forwarding and search are orthogonal products solving different issues, so first, I’d point out that the value of the email forwarding service doesn’t change.
But presumably DDG has contractual agreements with Microsoft so “no longer has an index” is a hypothetical that isn’t really grounded in reality or something that would be likely to happen without warning.
And if Bing is no longer viable at some point for some reason, that would be a good reason to change the priority of building an index.
But clearly DDG feels secure enough in their current agreement, and as of now, we have no reason to believe otherwise.
Part of privacy is reliability and certainty. Just take people's money like Proton, you can still have a free tier.
You have "email protection" but do you have nice stuff like sandbox detonation and private intel partnerships with companies like Proofpoint? That as a premium might be worth charging. Heck, even public yara rule scanning and allowing inbox owners to set things like DMARC enforcement and custom rules and actions would be a nice premium.
Even if ads do not appear on the product, it doesn’t mean that the data isn’t used to drive ads revenue. Are these addresses used for conversion measurement?
This is also the reason I'm not particularly excited about DDG in general. They have exactly the same business model as Google, so there is no reason for me to feel confident they won't follow the same trajectory as Google.
But they don't. Google is much bigger than search from an office competitor to a cloud provider to a phone software vendor. DDG will not become google. Something with a bigger reach like tiktok might.
Being funded by search ads was never an issue with google and privacy until they switch from contextual ads and morphed into personal ads.
DDG winning search on bing search isn't the same trajectory. At best lycos like would be the most likely trajectory.
Google in 1999 was an upstart search provider promising a clean, minimal, user-focused ad-supported search experience as an alternative to entrenched search engines like Lycos, Altavista, Yahoo.
DuckDuckGo in 2022 is an upstart search provider promising a clean, minimal, user-focused ad-supported search experience as an alternative to entrenched search engines like Google.
I'm old enough to remember when Google was the new and exciting thing (just give it a try and ignore the stupid-sounding name!). For the longest time there wasn't even such a thing as a Google account, it just saved preferences like safe-search locally using cookies, and ads were just a small distinctly colored text bar above the organic search results, directly related to your search keywords.
Not sure how paying for this service makes it any less likely that DDG will flip a switch to make that targeted advertising money though. That temptation will exist either with a paid service or a non targeted ad supported service.
Nothing is guaranteed, but at least you are the customer not the product if it's a paid service.
I have very little tolerance for companies that double-dip though. I subscribed to the New York Times for a while, but cancelled, in part, because they still stuffed their pages with ads both explicit and implicit.
You need to be explained why it's cheaper to publish news to a website than print physical papers every morning and deliver them to homes across the country every single day in time for it to be relevant?
The original Google ads were actually to the side - no way of confusing them with organic listings. Ads above results weren’t rolled out until 2007ish. Internally there was a lot of debate as to whether this might be confusing to users/evil, so the decision was to only show ads above results on queries that appeared to be high commercial intent. RIP old Google
I currently use Neeva. They're okay, but I'm still looking for a better option. I don't subscribe to their paid version because the upgrades you get just seem like silly gimics to me. They have some good ideas but fall short on execution in my mind.
I really want the option to turn off certain sites (eg. w3schools) entirely from search results, not just demote them.
Personally I see a difference between a search company funded by ads vs a privacy company that leverages anonymous search ads to pay for its privacy offerings. I mean yeah DDG could completely flip its business model but what would they actually flip to? Their only main differentiator is that they are privacy friendly.
As long as ads are their core revenue stream, there is a risk of compromising users. If you aren't paying for hte product, you aren't the customer, as the old saying goes, and no superficial rationale for why they are "different" will change this.
Please stop censoring search results, no matter how morally/politically opposed to them the organization may be. Privacy + Censorship is not a good mix.
We are not (and never were) censoring results. I realize I caused the misunderstanding due to own my unfortunate phrasing in a tweet, and since then, how our news results rankings work has been highly misinterpreted.
We (DuckDuckGo) subsequently made a help page to explain it in detail: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne.... Tl;dr: we don’t censor, we don’t move things so far down that they are effectively censored, we don't evaluate individual stories or narratives for "truth", and we don’t rank based on any political agenda or opinions. This is just a summary though so would read the help page for details.
I also put out a clarification thread about various misconceptions that included this topic amongst others (like the fact that no, we’re not owned by Google), but the help page referenced above is the best and most thorough explanation of our news rankings. https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1515635886855233537
Please don't post like this to HN, regardless of what someone else did or you feel they did. Regardless of what you do or don't owe them, you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
I'm sorry, but this does not seem to counter your initial tweet at all. Your first tweet said, and I quote, "At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation."
This is censorship, since DDG is now deciding what is considered "Disinformation".
Your clarification thread does not state DDG is not down-ranking these sites based on what DDG feels is "disinformation". It merely asserts DDG is not purging results - these are two very different things.
Just to be clear, I too support Ukraine, and am aghast at the deliberately misleading information ("disinformation") coming out of the Russian War Machine. However, as I previously wrote, the truth needs no defense. Hiding away things we don't like doesn't make them go away, it just makes them go underground. We need this information freely available so it can be discussed and disproven out in the open.
If users wanted curated search results, they might as well use Google or Bing...
Lastly, to repeat, Privacy + Censorship (of any kind) do not go together. This was quite a large misstep for DDG, and has burned a lot of trust.
Not sure if you read the whole thread as it says explicitly "We are not ranking based on any political agenda or my (or anyone else's) personal political opinions. We are also not assessing any individual news stories."
To be clear, that means we do not have a definition of "disinformation". I'm to blame for tweeting something that was highly ambiguous but we were never actually doing what we've been accused of doing.
They rank based on relevancy. Domains that are found misleading readers often are less relevant than domains that are misleading readers less often. That's it. All search engines have to make these calls all the time, and I see no viable alternative approach that would be better. There is no 'natural' ordering of the web...it's all judgment. If you think DDG's results are less relevant than those you get elsewhere, use the better engine!
I think you lost all credibility when you made that tweet. If you want to regain it, you should be completely transparent about which sites you have taken any specific ranking action regarding, and why. This should be relatively easy to do, as you say you take action very rarely.
@yegg Even if you don't agree with one side, you can't consider the side to be "spam", "disinformation" or "propaganda" and hope people will just be OK with that. What is spam to you, is useful information for somebody else, some people love what Tucker Carlson have to say, others prefer Brian Stelter. That's why freedom of speech exists[1]. I think the right approach to down ranking is having a banner with a link with undeniable proof of what the article says is wrong, which is very hard to do, I get it. Otherwise, is preferential down ranking, and whatever you argue on Twitter won't change the minds of people. I too have been using DDG from the beginning, and I'm grateful more private alternative to Google exists, I just hate censoring as much as privacy violating businesses.
I think you may have misinterpreted how this works. We do not do any page or story or narrative level assessment or fact checking at all, or any fact checking for that matter.
In the meantime, you can pay either Apple or Fastmail for this feature as part of their larger product offerings. Maybe there are other paid services which offer this as a feature. These are just the ones I'm aware of.
I think the honest answer there is that there is no way to promise that (who knows who's managing the project in the future). But I do know that the folks currently on the team are planning that, when we do raise the prices, we only do so for new subscribers (but again, this is not a promise, just my personal expectation).
How much would you pay? I've moved to posteo and I can't think of paying more than 1€/month for email. I never considered Protonmail because 4€/month is what i consider way too much for email. My root server is 6€/month (atom/4gb/1tb/100mbit).
I personally pay 10$ a month for GSuite basically to handle the mail of my personal domain name. Is it worth it? I'm not sure yet but I had way to much issues with email not delivered in the past (blacklisted IP ranges, reputation, etc.) when I had my own mail server.
I prefer paying 10$ a month and forget about mail server issues and wondering if my mail is going to the spam folder..
I don’t understand why people think the converse of “if you are not the customer, you’re the product” is true.
Contrapositive yes, converse no. Companies could still make money from both sides of a market. Look at the lack of net neutrality. Look also at how ISPs used to be able to sell your data, despite you paying them !
Plenty of stuff you pay for has ads. Newspapers, Cable tv even Netflix are talking about getting them. The corporate imperative to serve the shareholder trumps all others.
Newspapers is free or dirt cheap. You basically pay the paper and distribution costs if anything. Those that do charge to read it online don't show ads to subscribers.
> Cable tv
The main selling point of cable TV was no ads. Eventually they started adding ads, and that's probably the reason cable tv is fading away.
> Netflix
Doesn't have ads right now, and if they do in future, people will just move away.
This is a great idea, but it's going to take nearly zero time for companies to decide not to accept private duck addresses for business purposes.
DDG is signing themselves up for a hard challenge, though I think they're up to it. Once you offer a service like this, you take upon yourself the burden of maximizing the outbound signal-noise ratio for emails, or you run the risk that other email providers identify your node as damaged and route around it. So they'll have to be on top of uses of their service for spam and aggressively police and kill those accounts. I'm excited to see what special sauce they're bringing to the field in this space.
Just a note... an email anonymous relay that lets you use custom domains is a much better alternative if you ever plan on migrating away. SimpleLogin is open source and allows you to export the information so that if their service ever goes offline you have a backup and can recover your aliases.
Could someone explain a bit about where this fits in?
Is this an e-mail provider? A client? Something else?
If I have X Provider and I access it using Y client (ie, Thunderbird), what exactly does this add/replace/enhance? Where does "Relay" fit in since some people here mention it?
So I could set up a new e-mail address, have it forward to my existing e-mail address, and DDG does some filtering/spam protection before it does the forward?
You do if you want to autocomplete your email address in fields I guess, but I agree it isn't a very good reason for an extension. It's one of those convenience extension that, would it be made by any other company, I'd be very suspicious of.
Email tracking is just done through image downloads right? So if images are blocked by default then tracking isn’t possible? Image blocking is easy enough to do.
Feels like it tries to solve the same problems as Mozilla Relay [1] (they call it Firefox Relay, but the addresses are @mozmail.com soooo) except Mozilla lets you attribute specific aliases for things.
Good to see more like it, but having only 5 addresses for free feels like DOA now. Even during the waitlist they didn’t increase the number, kinda shameful.
I was able to generate a random private duck address (o8oyr2f8@duck.com) that's connected to my name@duck.com which then forwards to my personal gmail. I can change the forwarding address too which helps when I move from gmail to a private-er service. Please send me your best educational spams at the address above. It will self-destruct shortly when I generate a new private address. Really cool to see more offerings like these.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadi have been selfhosting on racknerd for like last 2 years and beyond the first month, i have been pretty much put it on auto mode.
i use mailinabox so i get to use roundcube and it has a banner
"To protect your privacy remote resources have been blocked."
this is by default for all links and images unless i explicitly allow someone so isn't that the same thing?
I wish there was a way for these relay services to be effective since they are much, much easier to get someone to use than telling them to just up and move from gmail to fastmail.
I can't for the life of me, however, figure out how to get 1Password to auto-gen a masked email from their iPhone app or desktop app.
Is this possible?
However, during that time I filed two support tickets and neither left me feeling particularly warm and fuzzy about the faces behind the business that I was pledging my annual subscription to. The response in the latter instance in fact was so bad that it's what motivated me to look elsewhere rather than renew. I was prepared to pay more just to know that I wasn't doing business with bullies/jerks. I ended up going with a smaller provider. Without checking, my annual expenses are actually around half as much, IIRC.
I really wanted to switch to Fastmail a few years back but 1) its registration page was intermittently down for me and 2) when I caught it during uptime, it sent me to phone SMS verification which I found invasive given it is a paid service. I was ready to give it a chance anyway, but no SMS got delivered to me in the end.
Your profile doesn't list a way to contact you privately.
As of last year, it's supposed to be one of the services listed on <https://www.fsf.org/resources/webmail-systems>, but it's not. I just reached out to Greg Farough to follow up on why.
By the way, according to my Mail's connection doctor on mac, it appears to use IMAP when talking to gmail as of now. I wasn't aware Google was phasing out proper IMAP support, my concern was more about them being known to ban accounts with little recourse.
I've been using them for 18 months and the support has been not perfect, but 100x that of e.g. Amazon support chat
Having used Firefox Relay a bit, I'm pretty happy with it but the free tier is relatively limited. DDG email seems to allow unlimited addresses but after a quick look it's not obvious that you can turn them off if an account is getting too much spam.
https://relay.firefox.com/
Can you provide a citation for this?
"At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation.": [1]
At this point, DDG is a front for Microsoft using 'privacy' buzzwords. Might as well use Brave Search then.
[0] https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
[1] https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318
[2] https://www.vox.com/recode/22981115/duckduckgo-free-speech-p...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/hx5dn5/proof_du...
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395635
At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation.
https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318
-----
> In addition to down-ranking sites associated with disinformation, we also often place news modules and information boxes at the top of DuckDuckGo search results (where they are seen and clicked the most) to highlight quality information for rapidly unfolding topics.
https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501717193855283201
----
It should be obvious why this is problematic ...
Or search google yourself to get a broader picture.
This is the gist of what everyone is upset about, of those who are upset. The entire point of DDG was that the search results were never to be tampered with for personalization reasons, censoring results due to political reasons seems to be a slippery slope.
I don't see how capturing personal information from users for any reason has anything whatsoever to do with omitting perceived misinformation from all users across the board. One can agree or disagree with the decision, but they are two entirely different issues in entirely different areas, and one is in no way a "slippery slope" toward the other.
Also, search engines have _as their sole purpose_ sorting their list of links by some measure of quality. Removing useless nonsense is what we go there for.
We (DuckDuckGo) subsequently made a help page to explain it in detail: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne... Tl;dr: we don’t censor, we don’t move things so far down that they are effectively censored, we don't evaluate individual stories or narratives for "truth", and we don’t rank based on any political agenda or opinions. This is just a summary though so would read the help page for details.
I also put out a clarification thread about misconceptions that included this topic amongst others (like the fact that no, we’re not owned by Google), but the help page referenced above is the best and most thorough explanation of our news rankings. https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1515635886855233537
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo
It's your deep financial ties to Microsoft that's worrying. And it seems you're willing to turn your back on privacy/tracking for your friends when Microsoft asks.
https://twitter.com/shivan_kaul/status/1528879590772338689
As for our private search engine, it is in actually way more than Bing at this point. We have approximately a millions lines of search code at this point, many tens of millions of dollars invested in them and a staff of about 200.
Please let me pay for this service. It looks worth having and: 1) I'd like to know that it is funded by users, rather than advertisers and thus can resist privacy invasion presuures. 2) I'd like to have some basis for belief that it will be around longer than it takes the VC money to run out, (or the marketing budget, or whatever non-sustainable pot it comes from).
Our product vision is an "easy button" for privacy, an all-in-one privacy app. Email protection is part of that, along with search, browsing, etc. Put another way, we see email protection as part of our core product, and within our app we autofill duck addresses in email forms.
We will take your comment into consideration, though we prefer free services where possible so more people can get privacy protection, which is in line with our mission. This service comes with it a set of privacy guarantees here: https://duckduckgo.com/email/privacy-guarantees and we will not be putting ads on it.
If a product is subsidized by a company's other products, it's hard for me to believe it'll be around forever. For an email product, that's a huge problem, because I use my address in hundreds of contexts that take a long time to identify and migrate, much longer than a typical company's sunsetting notice.
EDIT: The parent comment was edited to note that they perceive DDG Email as part of the core product, not a separate product. That's helpful to know, but I'm still skeptical that that's sustainable in the long term. This would not be the first time a feature was cut from a product because it was too expensive to maintain. I'll be waiting to see their unified privacy solution really take off before I place any bets on this feature.
Just because you're a product doesn't mean the service is not sustainable. It should be very easy for them to figure out whether the feature is profitable or not compared to other acquisition methods.
Fastmail’s email servers are in the US and the company is in Australia. Both are in the five eyes jurisdictions, plus Australia has some draconian laws (see Assistance and Access Bill, though email itself is generally not a secure enough channel). ProtonMail is in Switzerland, which is better surveillance-wise, but it still complies (as one would expect a company to) with court orders and has disclosed the IP address of an activist due to a court order.
Fastmail supports IMAP, which means you can use any email client on a desktop or phone. ProtonMail does not support IMAP directly on desktops and requires a “bridge application” for IMAP. This is provided for paying customers. ProtonMail does not have any support for IMAP on smartphones, where you’re either left to using the browser or using the ProtonMail app.
While one may marginally improve some aspects of the service and has strategic value, the other actually moves the needle in terms of an end-user's overall privacy.
But presumably DDG has contractual agreements with Microsoft so “no longer has an index” is a hypothetical that isn’t really grounded in reality or something that would be likely to happen without warning.
And if Bing is no longer viable at some point for some reason, that would be a good reason to change the priority of building an index.
But clearly DDG feels secure enough in their current agreement, and as of now, we have no reason to believe otherwise.
You have "email protection" but do you have nice stuff like sandbox detonation and private intel partnerships with companies like Proofpoint? That as a premium might be worth charging. Heck, even public yara rule scanning and allowing inbox owners to set things like DMARC enforcement and custom rules and actions would be a nice premium.
This is also the reason I'm not particularly excited about DDG in general. They have exactly the same business model as Google, so there is no reason for me to feel confident they won't follow the same trajectory as Google.
Being funded by search ads was never an issue with google and privacy until they switch from contextual ads and morphed into personal ads.
DDG winning search on bing search isn't the same trajectory. At best lycos like would be the most likely trajectory.
DuckDuckGo in 2022 is an upstart search provider promising a clean, minimal, user-focused ad-supported search experience as an alternative to entrenched search engines like Google.
I'm old enough to remember when Google was the new and exciting thing (just give it a try and ignore the stupid-sounding name!). For the longest time there wasn't even such a thing as a Google account, it just saved preferences like safe-search locally using cookies, and ads were just a small distinctly colored text bar above the organic search results, directly related to your search keywords.
Not sure how paying for this service makes it any less likely that DDG will flip a switch to make that targeted advertising money though. That temptation will exist either with a paid service or a non targeted ad supported service.
I have very little tolerance for companies that double-dip though. I subscribed to the New York Times for a while, but cancelled, in part, because they still stuffed their pages with ads both explicit and implicit.
I really want the option to turn off certain sites (eg. w3schools) entirely from search results, not just demote them.
Open this page in the DuckDuckGo app to continue.”
Reminds me of Reddit shenanigans…
Please stop censoring search results, no matter how morally/politically opposed to them the organization may be. Privacy + Censorship is not a good mix.
The truth needs no defense.
We (DuckDuckGo) subsequently made a help page to explain it in detail: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne.... Tl;dr: we don’t censor, we don’t move things so far down that they are effectively censored, we don't evaluate individual stories or narratives for "truth", and we don’t rank based on any political agenda or opinions. This is just a summary though so would read the help page for details.
I also put out a clarification thread about various misconceptions that included this topic amongst others (like the fact that no, we’re not owned by Google), but the help page referenced above is the best and most thorough explanation of our news rankings. https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1515635886855233537
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is censorship, since DDG is now deciding what is considered "Disinformation".
Your clarification thread does not state DDG is not down-ranking these sites based on what DDG feels is "disinformation". It merely asserts DDG is not purging results - these are two very different things.
Just to be clear, I too support Ukraine, and am aghast at the deliberately misleading information ("disinformation") coming out of the Russian War Machine. However, as I previously wrote, the truth needs no defense. Hiding away things we don't like doesn't make them go away, it just makes them go underground. We need this information freely available so it can be discussed and disproven out in the open.
If users wanted curated search results, they might as well use Google or Bing...
Lastly, to repeat, Privacy + Censorship (of any kind) do not go together. This was quite a large misstep for DDG, and has burned a lot of trust.
That said, the help page I referenced is the most detailed explanation of how our news rankings work: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne....
To be clear, that means we do not have a definition of "disinformation". I'm to blame for tweeting something that was highly ambiguous but we were never actually doing what we've been accused of doing.
It's a very tough situation, needing to assure people that you honestly aren't doing what you claimed and just misspoke.
1- https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-neo-naz...
Edit: My bad, I missed a legit link in parent comment. That said, that link should have been front & center. (Edit 2: it now is. Good on you!)
I prefer paying 10$ a month and forget about mail server issues and wondering if my mail is going to the spam folder..
That being said, there’s probably not much need to pay more than $5/mo. I’m very happy with Fastmail at $60/yr.
https://relay.firefox.com/premium/
Which support custom domain and more features, and not locked to a specific browser.
Both open source and self-hostable, SL is by Proton(Mail).
Contrapositive yes, converse no. Companies could still make money from both sides of a market. Look at the lack of net neutrality. Look also at how ISPs used to be able to sell your data, despite you paying them !
Newspapers is free or dirt cheap. You basically pay the paper and distribution costs if anything. Those that do charge to read it online don't show ads to subscribers.
> Cable tv
The main selling point of cable TV was no ads. Eventually they started adding ads, and that's probably the reason cable tv is fading away.
> Netflix
Doesn't have ads right now, and if they do in future, people will just move away.
the only way the fastmail one works is there's paying customers on that domain (and a lot of them)
They can’t block all domains other than gmail and outlook, can they?
DDG is signing themselves up for a hard challenge, though I think they're up to it. Once you offer a service like this, you take upon yourself the burden of maximizing the outbound signal-noise ratio for emails, or you run the risk that other email providers identify your node as damaged and route around it. So they'll have to be on top of uses of their service for spam and aggressively police and kill those accounts. I'm excited to see what special sauce they're bringing to the field in this space.
Is this an e-mail provider? A client? Something else?
If I have X Provider and I access it using Y client (ie, Thunderbird), what exactly does this add/replace/enhance? Where does "Relay" fit in since some people here mention it?
Competitors would include Cloudflare¹ and Apple².
¹ https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-email-routing/
² https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/what-you-can-do-with-...
Go on.....
well, that's cool I guess
EDIT: The site has been updated to point to this!
1 https://relay.firefox.com/
https://anonaddy.com/#pricing
I'm surprised to see that Safari is not supported.