Search Engine “Duck Duck Go” Experiences Traffic Surge in Wake of NSA Scandal

By Michael Krieger: The tremendous positive impact from Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations will only be properly appreciated in the years and decades ahead, but I believe they will be extraordinary. In fact, we are already seeing many of them. From the recent halt on the CISPA bill in Congress, to the forced exposure of authoritarian shills in the mainstream media as they struggle to publicly defend the NSA. However, perhaps the most significant long-term impact will be the resulting boom in the privacy business.  If you recall, I wrote a piece titled Bitcoin and Kim Dotcom: Why it’s Time to “Encrypt Everything” a couple of months ago.
In what I think is great news, the alternative, “non-tracking” search engine Duck Duck Go has seen a surge in traffic since the NSA scandal was revealed.  As was noted in a Guardian article from today: “If the NSA demanded data from DuckDuckGo, there would be none to hand over.”  More on this fascinating trend below:
Gabriel Weinberg noticed web traffic building on the night of Thursday 6 June – immediately after the revelations about the “Prism” program. Through the programme, the US’s National Security Agency claimed to have “direct access” to the servers of companies including, crucially, the web’s biggest search engines – Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

Within days of the story, while the big companies were still spitting tacks and tight-lipped disclaimers, the search engine Weinberg founded – which pledges not to track or store data about its users – was getting 50% more traffic than ever before. That has gone up and up as more revelations about NSA and GCHQ internet tapping have come in.
Using it is very definitely an active choice, whereas using Google is the default option on most browsers. And 95% of people never change the default settings on anything.
But this 20-person business offers what none of the big search engines do: zero tracking. It doesn’t use cookies or store data about its users’ IP addresses, doesn’t offer user logins, and uses an encrypted connection by default.
 If the NSA demanded data from DuckDuckGo, there would be none to hand over.
Having decided that searching is intimately personal, he deduced that governments would want to get hold of search data. “I looked at the search fiascos such as the AOL data release, and decided that government requests were real and would be inevitable, and that search engines and content companies would be handing over that data [to government] in increasing amounts.”
Search data, he says, “is arguably the most personal data people are entering into anything. You’re typing in your problems, your desires. It’s not the same as things you post publicly on a social network.”
So why does Google store it? “It’s a myth that Google needs to store all this data about you. Almost all the money they make on search is based on what you type into the search box. Nothing more.
Having your data passed around can also lead you to be charged more for an item: if your browsing history shows you visit high-end sites, some sites will increase prices. (That’s why plane fares can drop if you delete the “cookie” files in your browser.) 
Even so, not everyone believes Weinberg’s success matters much. Danny Sullivan, who runs the Search Engine Land site, and has been analysing the search business since Google was just a gleam in the eyes of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, argues that DuckDuckGo’s size really indicates people don’t care about privacy.
“People don’t care about privacy.”  I’ll take the other side of that.
Full article here.
In Liberty,
Mike

Source 

WB7