Tuesday, December 28, 2021
Monday, December 27, 2021
DuckDuckGo may be the search engine for you. . . | Bleeping Computer
Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo grew by 46% in 2021
"The privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo continues to grow rapidly, with the company now averaging over 100 million daily search queries and growing by almost 47% in 2021.
Unlike other search engines, DuckDuckGo says they do not track your searches or your behavior on other sites. Instead of building user profiles used to display interest-based ads, DuckDuckGo search pages display contextual advertisements based on the searched keywords.
This means that if you search on DuckDuckGo for a television, that search query will not be used to display television ads at every other site you visit.
Furthermore, to build their search index, the search engine uses the DuckDuckBot spider to crawl sites and receive data from partners, such as Wikipedia and Bing. However, they do not build their index using data from Google.
DuckDuckGo shows rapid growth
While Google remains the dominant search platform, DuckDuckGo has seen impressive year-over-year growth.
> In 2020, DuckDuckGo received 23.6 billion total search queries and achieved a daily average of 79 million search queries by the end of December.
> In 2021, DuckDuckGo received 34.6 billion total search queries so far and currently has an average of 100 million search queries per day, showing a 46.4% growth for the year.
While DuckDuckGo's growth is considerable, it still only has 2.53% of the total market share, with Yahoo at 3.3%, Bing at 6.43%, and Google holding a dominant share of 87.33% of search engine traffic in the USA.
However, as people continue to become frustrated with how their data is being used by tech giants like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple, we will likely see more people switch to privacy-focused search engines.
To further help users protect their privacy, DuckDuckGo released an email forwarding service in 2021 called 'Email Protection' that strips email trackers and allows you to protect your actual email address.
They also introduced 'App Tracking Protection for Android,' which blocks third-party trackers from Google and Facebook found in apps.
More recently, DuckDuckGo announced they are releasing a DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser for Desktop that will not be based on Chromium and will be built from scratch.
"No complicated settings, no misleading warnings, no "levels" of privacy protection – just robust privacy protection that works by default, across search, browsing, email, and more," explains a recent blog post about the new browser.
"It's not a "privacy browser"; it's an everyday browsing app that respects your privacy because there's never a bad time to stop companies from spying on your search and browsing history."
For those looking to take back control of their data and add more privacy to their search behavior, DuckDuckGo may be the search engine for you."
AUTO-CONTROL: Your Ride is a Streaming Catch of Profitable Data-Points
". . .Indeed, the smartphone wars are over, and Google and Apple won. Now they — and Amazon — are battling to control how you operate within your car. All three see autos as the next great opportunity to reach American consumers, who spend more time in the driver’s seat than anywhere outside their home or workplace. And automakers, after years of floundering to incorporate cutting-edge technologies into cars on their own, are increasingly eager for Silicon Valley’s help — hoping to adopt both its tech and its lucrative business models where consumers pay monthly for ongoing services instead of shelling out for a product just once. . .
The stakes are enormous. Tech companies and the automakers envision a future where riders can seamlessly blend work, play and chores, easily ordering groceries, scheduling work meetings or watching TV from the comfort of their cars. The data coming off those vehicles also could automatically update maps, notify city workers about potholes and tell brick-and-mortar retailers where customers travel from.
[...]
Brand loyalty or monopoly?
While Silicon Valley and automakers are thrilled about the future of connected and autonomous cars, regulators and privacy advocates are less so.
“These companies have an amount of data on us that they shouldn’t have, and they have a history of not using it in responsible ways,” said Katharine Trendacosta of the digital civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation. “They have a history of going back on promises they have made about that data.”
[...] READ IN-BETWEEN-THE-LINES https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/12/27/self-driving-car-big-tech-monopoly-525867
“I know it’s hard to see in the future and difficult to make guesses about what companies should be allowed to do with technology that doesn’t exist. But we know what they are doing with things that already exist,” Trendacosta said. “If we had rules that carry forward to whatever they make in the future, we’d be in a better place.”
A Botnik Studios Interview | The Guardian Built Another AI-Generated Zuckerbot For An Interview ...
‘I do surfing’: an AI-generated Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s bad year
". . .What does Mark Zuckerberg care about?
The 37-year-old tech executive has a wife, two kids, $110bn , and near absolute control over a group of companies – Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp – that shape the information, entertainment, and communication of 3 billion people.
But in a year that kicked off with those companies playing a major role in fueling a violent and conspiracy-addled riot at the US Capitol on 6 January, and closed with a whistleblower revealing just how much Facebook knew – and concealed from the public – about the damage it was doing to individuals and societies, Zuckerberg has himself seemed remarkably unbothered.
Gone is the Zuckerberg who repeated apologies and pledges to take a broader view of Facebook’s responsibility ad nauseum. New Zuck (dare we call him “metaZuck”?) appears to be primarily focused on his super relatable hobbies (electric surfing, fencing, hydrofoiling, boar hunting) and building a fantasy world that he hasn’t managed to mess up – yet.
“I just decided to focus more on some of the awesome things we’re building, and doing more fun things with my family and friends,” Zuckerberg said to a fan who asked about the secret to his being “super laid-back and funny these last few months”.
The Guardian would have loved to ask Zuckerberg some follow-up questions about that, but since metaZuck isn’t doing much in the way of sitting for interviews with critical journalists these days, we fell back upon a last resort: we built another Zuckerbot and interviewed it instead.
To do this, we worked with Botnik Studios to create a predictive keyboard trained on the past two years of Zuckerberg’s public statements (archived by Marquette University’s Zuckerberg Files).
> Our previous interview with the Zuckerbot, conducted in 2019 and based on Zuck’s statements from 2016 to 2019, can be found here. Guardian journalists provided the questions; Botnik used the predictive keyboard to generate the answers.
Hi Mark, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to the Guardian. It’s been a busy two years since we spoke, and your company has now been implicated in even more violence and unrest around the world. Congratulations!
Thank you for welcoming me here today with your own self. Being present with you in person is going to be a killer part of history.
The metaverse is a big, valuable baked dumpling full of content without nudity
To start, you recently changed Facebook’s name to Meta. Why?
Imagine a multiplayer game where you pay off a bunch of publications who are physically afraid of content. This is the basic idea behind the internet. Now look up at the sun, close your eyes, feel completely wrapped in virtual goods and commerce. That is the ultimate expression of social networks. That is the metaverse.
[...] You were raised Jewish and have said religion is very important to you. How do you think God will judge you?
I believe deeply in a wireless experience you have in the Next Time. You get a mentor and you see a cool effect, and then you go to juvenile detention center in the metaverse. It has a massive amount of problematic goods and it has solar-powered privacy controls that you can break by talking. And it has a major part with a judgment room, right in the top. In this room we are always faced by ourselves. This is inspiring for a second, but it starts to be clear that you are very afraid. That’s gonna be a big part of the challenge in the world to come.
You control a 55% voting stake in your company. What safeguards exist to check your power?
I need to ask permission from a big personal influence – my parents. They don’t expect that their friends will like the new things I’ve done. Hopefully, later on helping me will become their lives but for now we’re gonna roll with social media for all kinds of ages.
Let’s play a game. What are two truths and one lie about yourself?
One: I have no company. Two: I have no tolerance for the town square. Three: I do surfing and I am grateful for the world of water.. .
HOW ABOUT SOME MORE?? >>
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/27/mark-zuckerberg-ai-robot-metaverse-facebook
Cartoon Carousel The nation’s cartoonists on the week in politics | By POLITICO STAFF 01/23/2026 05:00 AM EST
Every week political cartoonists throughout the country and across the political spectrum apply their ink-stained skills to capture the fo...
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Flash News: Ukraine Intercepts Russian Kh-59 Cruise Missile Using US VAMPIRE Air Defense System Mounted on Boat. Ukrainian forces have made ...
