Ahead of third antitrust ruling, Google announces fresh tweaks to Android in Europe

Google is widely expected to be handed a third antitrust fine in Europe this week, with reports suggesting the European Commission’s decision in its long-running investigation of AdSense could land later today. Right on cue the search giant has PRed another Android product tweak — which it bills as “supporting choice and competition in Europe”. […]

View More Ahead of third antitrust ruling, Google announces fresh tweaks to Android in Europe

Ahead of third antitrust ruling, Google announces fresh tweaks to Android in Europe

Google is widely expected to be handed a third antitrust fine in Europe this week, with reports suggesting the European Commission’s decision in its long-running investigation of AdSense could land later today. Right on cue the search giant has PRed another Android product tweak — which it bills as “supporting choice and competition in Europe”. […]

View More Ahead of third antitrust ruling, Google announces fresh tweaks to Android in Europe

Google has quietly added DuckDuckGo as a search engine option for Chrome users in ~60 markets

In an update to the chromium engine, which underpins Google’s popular Chrome browser, the search giant has quietly updated the lists of default search engines it offers per market — expanding the choice of search product users can pick from in markets around the world. Most notably it’s expanded search engine lists to include pro-privacy […]

View More Google has quietly added DuckDuckGo as a search engine option for Chrome users in ~60 markets

Has the fight over privacy changed at all in 2019?

Few issues divide the tech community quite like privacy. Much of Silicon Valley’s wealth has been built on data-driven advertising platforms, and yet, there remain constant concerns about the invasiveness of those platforms. Such concerns have intensified in just the last few weeks as France’s privacy regulator placed a record fine on Google under Europe’s […]

View More Has the fight over privacy changed at all in 2019?

DuckDuckGo debuts map search results using Apple Maps

DuckDuckGo has a new, unlikely partner in search: Apple. The privacy-focused search engine that promises to never track its users said Tuesday it’s now using data provided by Apple Maps to power its map-based search results. Although DuckDuckGo had provided limited mapping results for a while using data from open-source service OpenStreetMap, it never scaled its […]

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Tor pulls in record donations as it lessens reliance on US government grants

Tor, the open source initiative which provides a more secure way to access the internet, is continuing to diversify its funding away from its long-standing reliance on U.S. government grants. The Tor Foundation — the organization behind the service which stands for ‘The Onion Router’ — announced this week that it brought in a record […]

View More Tor pulls in record donations as it lessens reliance on US government grants

Apple’s increasingly tricky international trade-offs

Far from Apple’s troubles in emerging markets and China, the company is attracting the ire of what should really be a core supporter demographic naturally aligned with the pro-privacy stance CEO Tim Cook has made into his public soapbox in recent years — but which is instead crying foul over perceived hypocrisy. The problem for this subset […]

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Duck.com now points to DuckDuckGo, not Google

Non-tracking search engine, DuckDuckGo, is now a little easier to find online after the company acquired the premium generic domain name  duck.com — thereby shaving a few letters off its usual URL. This means browsing to duck.com now automatically redirects to DuckDuckGo .com. The twist in this tale is that duck.com’s prior owner was Google. […]

View More Duck.com now points to DuckDuckGo, not Google

Google ‘incognito’ search results still vary from person to person, DDG study finds

A study of Google search results by anti-tracking rival DuckDuckGo has suggested that escaping the so-called ‘filter bubble’ of personalized online searches is a perniciously hard problem for the put upon Internet consumer who just wants to carve out a little unbiased space online, free from the suggestive taint of algorithmic fingers. DDG reckons it’s […]

View More Google ‘incognito’ search results still vary from person to person, DDG study finds

How a small French privacy ruling could remake adtech for good

A ruling in late October against a little known French adtech firm that popped up on the national data watchdog’s website earlier this month, is causing ripples of excitement to run through privacy watchers in Europe who believe it signals the beginning of the end for creepy online ads. The excitement is palpable. Impressively so, […]

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Big tech must not reframe digital ethics in its image

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s visage loomed large over the European parliament this week, both literally and figuratively, as global privacy regulators gathered in Brussels to interrogate the human impacts of technologies that derive their power and persuasiveness from our data. The eponymous social network has been at the center of a privacy storm this year. And […]

View More Big tech must not reframe digital ethics in its image