With regard to Yandex and Baidu: there's the notion of threat proximity. Google is a US company, beholden to US laws. If you reside in the United States, you also reside in the jurisdiction of state actors with the capability to get at you.
If Putin himself showed up to Yandex HQ and demanded a full data dump of every search you made, he is still incapable of touching you, whereas J. Random Agent at the FBI can throw you in a 6x8 steel box.
Surely this is not suggesting that Google searches afford any privacy. ;)
While it might not be the Russian government who is watching, Google searches are certainly not ephemeral nor free from analysis in real-time. Aside from "things important to Russian politics", I would guess Google on behalf of its customers, who could be anyone, including governments, is far more interested in what someone is searching than the Russian government.
The point I am getting at here is that there is privacy from a government and there is privacy from a company. Each is a form of privacy, but only the company is in the business of commercialising the information it derives from violating privacy. (Not to mention that, at least in the US, the government is subject to a body of privacy law that does not apply to companies.)
Both the government and the company may violate privacy in the interests of staying in power. They could, e.g., suppress certain information when it is in their interests. However only the ad services company has the additional motivation to collect information to generate profits. The government may believe it has no choice but to monitor web search. The company OTOH freely chooses to monitor web search, as a business.
Anyway, here is a question I have about Yandex.
Google, Bing and other search engines such as DuckDuckGo now limit the number of results that can be retrieved in one session. Based on personal observation, with Google the ceiling is currently 300, with Bing and DDG, it's more like 250.^1 I wonder if Yandex is doing the same.
These limits by Google, Bing, DDG, etc. are eliminating "discoverability" via searching the web. "General" searches that would yield more than 300 results will not return more than 300 results. Users collecting large numbers of results from a general search is effectively prohibited. Google's idea of discovery is "I'm feeling lucky". Of all the silly changes Google has made to search, the most useless feature persists.
Perhaps "broad" searches do not benefit an online ad services business as much as more specific searches do. Limiting total results also puts more pressure on websites to try to be listed within the first 300. (Solution: Buy ads from Google.) A website who is at position 301 is undiscoverable thanks to Google's inexplicable truncation. Interestingly, on some, perhaps all, of their different "UI's", Google no longer numbers results.
1. To illustrate the truncation, try a search for a common string that would appear in the <title> tag of more than 300 pages on the web. https://www.google.com/search?q=title:[common string]&num=100&filter=0
1) Google don't have the ability to take your life or limit your freedom.
2) Google maintains full control of your data. They will serve ads based on very specific criteria, but they're not going to give advertisers an Excel file with names and email addresses. That's bad for business.
I can support this, but only if it offers real safety as opposed to Google.
So does it? Or is it safe only because NSA hasn't bothered to go to DDG yet, or do whatever they are doing to get Google's search data (cable splitters or whatever)?
Maybe the NSA should just outsource their IT operations to Google... Google has a better security/breach track record, and seems to do better in terms of finding what people are looking for.. I'm sure giving them more data to work with could only help. :-D
1) isn't it somewhat unlawful these days not to log anything on the people that are using your website? I'm all in favor of DDG, but can't they be liable if it would ever come up someone build and detonated bomb thanks to finding info via their search engine?
2) How do we know they haven't been served with NSL ? With NSA capable of breaking SSL, how do we know using DDG != using Google ?
a) The fact that they didn't appear in Snowden's documents like the other companies,
b) the fact that companies like Google (and Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc.) have it as their mission to build as precise user profiles as possible ("data hoover"), for example because the rely on advertising revenue. (Google is a 1-trick-pony, advertising being its trick.)
I think the NSA have proven if a particular data provider (in this case Google) doesn't agree or can't provide the info the NSA wants, the NSA have the capabilities to sniff the traffic on a multitude of levels. Privacy is an illusion, but I can attest to the fact DuckDuckGo is the more secure option.
I fear google way more than the NSA or the government. Google can link my name to someone claiming I'm a racist. It can tie me to stupid things I said online 15 years ago. Who knows what it will do in 5 years when Bing reduces their profit margin.
In order for the NSA to actually hurt me the government would have to essentially go full on fascist. But even in that case, first thing they'd do was to crack open Google's database.
That's what the FBI did after 9-11. They went to VISA and Mastercard to find out what the hijackers were up to.
How would not using their products resolve the issue with the NSA? If people switched to other providers than other providers will get accessed like Google.
There's also the important question of jurisdiction and closeness.
If I have to share my data with someone, I'd rather it be someone distant, and with limited capability. Sharing my data with Google is effectively the same thing as sharing my data with the FBI. And the FBI can stick guns in my face and lock me in a steel cage for anything they don't like in said data.
While I'm no fan of Putin, his regime can do precisely nothing actionable with my data, so long as I don't set foot in its territory.
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