Re: revenue sharing agreement with DuckDuckGo
On Thu, March 29, 2012 04:27, Paul Wise wrote:
> Probably you missed the part of the email that says we should add
> t=debian by default to every new DDG search URL? I would suggest that
> it should be up to the users what t= should be set to when sending
> search requests to DDG, not Debian.
I'm surprised by the notion that merely sending the string 'debian' to the
search engine is construed to be detrimental of my privacy. While indeed
hypothetically sharing some bit of information, it's rather high-level
information about somebody which I really doubt would influence anyone's
life in any meaningful way if it's 'leaked'.
Privacy law discerns certain categories of information that require
protection (like your home address) and categories that require even more
stringent protection (like race or religion). We should obviously strive
to do better than the minimum standards of such laws, but the boolean 'is
Debian user' (of which there are millions in the world) is in my view far
removed from what actually constitutes disclosure worth worrying about.
The average request, containing an IP-address, User-Agent and plugin
information already discloses so much information about a user's computing
environment that my opinion on the DDG-proposal is not at all influenced
by the mere fact that it requires adding a t=debian parameter. Someone can
know the brand of my bike when parked in front of my house. That doesn't
make me uneasy at all.
Cheers,
Thijs
Reply to: