DuckDuckGo Privacy Article and Thoughts
This article below, from #DuckDuckGo's official #privacy #blog, is about the difficulty of changing the default search provider on #Android devices.
Title:
Search Engines Should be Able to Guide Consumers to Search Preference Menus
URL:
spreadprivacy.com/one-click-preference-menu/
A direct quote from the article:
"Right now, for example, Google’s search preference menu in Europe is shown to consumers just once, on initial device setup. Believe or not, the only way to get back to it thereafter is to erase all data on the device through a hard “factory reset,” returning the device to an initial device setup state."
My #thoughts:
I absolutely agree that users should be able to exercise total control over what search provider they use on their devices. It should be as simple as changing a setting. The setting should be easily accessible, user-friendly, and unintrusive.
On a separate topic, the main operating systems that everyday people use, #macOS, #Windows 10, and #iOS have been integrating search features into the operating system itself so you don't have to open the browser to search something.
On iOS, what you type into Search feature is automatically sent to #Apple servers, with no way to disable it.
This is obviously a risk to user privacy. The iOS Search feature does not say where it fetches its results, either. I use it to access my #iPhone's built-in dictionary. Unfortunately, there's no way to access its dictionary without sending information to Apple servers.
