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- cross-posted to:
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DDG is now offering free/private AI chat using several models.
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Its initial prompt:
Private, yet uses closed source shitty models.
If they are using GPT-3.5 and Claude, that means that they are sending the chats to Open AI and Anthropic, right? How can they assure that the chats are private and not being used in training if they don’t control what other companies do?
Edit: ok, they claim to have agreements with them to delete chats within 30 days and they hide the user IP
DDG’s classic “Trust me bro” privacy policy.
I don’t dislike DDG and I do use it, but goddamn I’d love to see a public audit of their privacy claims. DDG is closed source and they’ve only ever given Their Word TM about their claims. The privacy community puts a lot of faith in DDG despite not being able to test anything it says.
Every service that claims to be private should be obliged to have a recent public audit available as a proof
Kagi!!!
I started using it entirely last month and I’m never going back.
Kagi isn’t open source either
It’s also a subscription based search engine. After Neeva imploded I’m not going to be investing money into a subscription search service.
And their CEO is a maniac
That is how DDG search works as well. They take your search query and send it to a regular, data harvesting search engine. The engine does not see your IP address and cannot track you with a cookie but they can monitor the search queries of DDG users in aggregate.
True, but anonymized search queries are much less personal than chats
Ddg doesnt work for search anymore, completely compromised giving the same results as google and others, exact same bubble you are in. I dont want personalisation
It works very well for me still. I haven’t noticed anything weird.
Hooefully it stays like that for you. For me I use it on all devices but they are all independent. If I search a random name it will find doctors etc. close to me with that name, down to my town. If I turn off location I will get a few general results and then back to localised.
It is incredibly annoying, especially when doing research as I cannot get out of the localised loop. Recently I needed a legislative policy from France but could not remember the name of the policy so I searched for the intention of the policy and got local results by local papers and local politicians discussing similar legislation. I could not get to the French results without using a VPN and I got very different results then.
There is also the concern then that ddg are sending my IP with the query. So I get bad results and no privacy.
They delete the chats but the metadata is forever
They state that they obsficate the metadata of chats sent to OpenAI
Doubt
Open source is the onlybway to know and DDG still hides a lot of their code
They say they proxy the requests. Deleting the chats after 30 days is meaningless, the data has already been utilized.
This is very surreal right now with what we’re dealing with.
Firefox is leaning towards AI but promised for years and years about how private it is and how they won’t do anything to your data.
DDG promised the same thing and was seen as the Anti-Google/Bing for a long time, now it’s dealing with AI and our data is now on the table again.
Why, guys?
The good: usability. Bot answers are easy to access but still very distinct from the actual websearch. And if you don’t like bot shit, it’s easy to ignore. (I found some use case for it, but I get that plenty people dislike this.)
The bad: as others mentioned, even if you trust DDG, you have no reason to trust Microsoft’s vassal OpenAI and its warring feud equally infested by tech bros Anthropic.
The ugly: the financial motivations behind the move are unclear. What is DDG trying to get from that? What is its business strategy?
I’m finding DDG results very inconsistent as of late.
I was trying to find an old podcast about the Stanford jail experiment. Couldn’t remember it was Stanford so my prompt was: radiolab jail experiment
I got a whole page of a Netflix jail experiment show. The entire page were links to Netflix or reviews or news about the Netflix show. Not a single mention of Stanford or radiolab at all
Switched my prompt to: “radiolab” jail experiment And immediately got what I was looking for.
Gotta say, not impressed with the results as off late
Yeah, DDG seems to have a heavy skew toward newer content. I’ve found myself using a lot of
"term"because it’s trying to find something new when I’m looking for something old.I still much prefer it to Google, but it could be a lot better.
Aaaaand the DDG enshitification begins… continues? continues.
Why do you call this enshitification, if it won’t affect the normal searching and is entirely optional?
Have they said that or are you just implying that? It’s beta right now but I’d put money on them following in Google’s footsteps and integrating right into the main search.
It’s enshitification because instead of simply fixing their crappy SEO laden results, they’re pushing this new thing.
I’m also willing to bet that once it’s out of beta there will be either a limit on free searches or it’ll just be straight up subscription model.
And just like that, normal search is dead, and the only viable option is to pay for their new thing
Right now, they’re offering the ai chat as a separate product, with separate terms of service and a privacy policy you have to manually agree to use. I hope they don’t mess with the standard search function.
I still use DDG (for search, none of the other bs they’ve been adding) because they are definitely better than Google or Bing. Is there a better alternative?
Startpage is pretty good.
wasn’t it bought by an advertising company?
Considering DDG’s privacy claims cannot be independently verified (and their MS tracking fiasco 2 years ago) they should be treated with the same level of caution that Startpage gets.
but the difference between DDG and startpage is that DDG allows connections through Tor and VPN, while startpage doesn’t. isn’t it suspicious ?
For searches, Kagi.
Edit: I guess Kagi sucks. But I still prefer their search results over DDG.
Funny how the bare HTML makes this feel weirdly personal. Maybe I should get around to making the shitty personal website I always wanted to make fifteen years ago.
You really should. https://indieweb.org has a lot of resources.
Whoa, awesome. I just tried it and copilot, which I did like, has been supplanted.
I’m getting way more accurate answers.
I tried out ddg’s ai with anthropic’s claude, and there was no character limit to inputs and no login required. With bing, it had a strict character limit, and required that I create an account and login.
I can’t see a huge difference between openai 3.5 and Claude on ddg, but they are both beating copilot hands down.
If I ask copilot a specific question, like when was the first year this product was released in the United States, it’ll describe the product stuff tell me about the product without mentioning the year, while the ddg chatbots both answer a similar question immediately and accurately.
My only problem is that unless I’m missing something, ddg botsdon’t provide the source they’re getting the information from, which I do like a lot with copilot, that I can make sure the source they’re pulling the information from is accurate immediately because the link is provided.
I’m pretty sure the bots on DDG don’t have internet access, just try asking a question about anything that happened very recently (e.g. last week) and they won’t be able to answer.
Chatgpt never did tho, they always have had a set time that their training data ended
you do realise gpt 3.5 turbo is still just chatgpt right ?
First people thought Firefox was the beacon of privacy, but they’re leaning on AI.
Now DDG is doing it?
What timeline are we in?
Firefox’s AI will be run entirely locally, information you feed it will be completely optional, and allegedly uses ethical training data where nothing was stolen. It’s private.
It will be used for things like offline translation, finding alternative sources for articles, spotting fake reviews, in the future better text to speech and image recognition for accessibility purposes, etc.
I think you’re having a kneejerk reaction of “All AI is bad, we must reject technology and embrace tradition”, which isn’t the right response to have. There are valid usecases, IMO, particularly for people with usability requirements.
Besides, the usual people who complain about Mozilla will complain if Firefox implements AI features, and they’ll also complain if they don’t, saying they’re falling further behind. Mozilla can’t win with you people.
All of Firefox’s ai initiatives including translation and chat are completely local. They have no impact on privacy.
Can you explain what you understand the implications of AI for privacy to be?
