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Re: revenue sharing agreement with DuckDuckGo



On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 09:25:48AM +0100, Philip Hands wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Mar 2012 00:06:46 +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@debian.org> wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 01:55:37PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> > > > DDG will earmark traffic originating for Debian, for browsers who want
> > > > to do so, by using the search URL
> > > > https://duckduckgo.com/?q={{search}}&t=debian
> > > 
> > > The privacy implications of this need to be considered. At least for
> > > Chromium there is no indication in the user agent that the user is
> > > using Debian.
> > 
> > Thanks for pointing this out. Let's consider them then.
> 
> Should this not be a debconf question, along the lines of popcon, but as
> a machine wide:
> 
>    Do you mind trading a little privacy to allow us to declare your use
>    of Debian to search engines, and thus possibly benefit from revenue
>    sharing arising from your searches?

I think this is a bad idea. If you don't do such a thing, and you leak
privacy, no harm done. If, however, you do implement such a thing, then
*every* piece of software that *might* expose that the user is running
Debian *must* be changed so it knows about this option and removes all
mention of Debian in its external communications.

And what to do about the mention of "iceweasel" in the iceweasel
User-Agent string? Is that Debian, too?

This quickly degrades to a slippery slope of things I would not want to
see us go down.

-- 
The volume of a pizza of thickness a and radius z can be described by
the following formula:

pi zz a


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