The NSA PRISM program’s revelation, thanks to Edward Snowden, like everything else, has its good and bad side. The good part is, we now know that the NSA has been spying on us and everybody else. The bad part is, the NSA is still spying on us and everybody else.
But there’s another side to the story. And it is: Folks that care about their privacy are flocking to Web and Internet services that offer some guarantee of privacy.
One of those services is DuckDuckGo, a search engine, just like Google. Though it’s not the 800-pound guerrilla that Google is, it has been steadily gaining converts, even becoming the default search engine in the Web browsers on many Linux distributions.
According to a story in The Guardian, the NSA RPISM story has led to a major surge in traffic for the young search engine’s services. Quoting Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckgo’s founder, the company went from serving 1.7 million searches per day at the beginning of June (2013) to 3.0 million daily two weeks later.
And I think it will only get better for the DuckDuckGo, which publishes its traffic stats here.
https://startpage.com/ is a better option than Duckduckgo in my opinion. Based in the Netherlands so hopefully out of reach of the USA.
p.s
Forgot to add: Many people are adopting different practices to try and keep privacy on the internet but they forget about the first hoop they have to go through, your I.S.P your provider. Many have black box installed, some claim they do not but they will have and all this data is collected and stored made available to law enforcement agencies and who knows who else.
DuckDuckGo privacy protection is a myth – they cannot show or prove it, they just make the claim it does.
You first initial search query may well be private but if the web-page you land on has google or Bing products and services then you have just been picked up,detected and a cookie dropped on you (check your folders and see) that first initial search query through DuckDuckGo was a waste of time.
Also the “do not track” request is a polite request that google and bing ignore anyway.
Your going to get picked up by google and bing, its impossible to escape undetected.