{"id":10054,"date":"2021-10-20T13:48:50","date_gmt":"2021-10-20T17:48:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=10054"},"modified":"2021-10-20T13:48:50","modified_gmt":"2021-10-20T17:48:50","slug":"how-to-avoid-search-warrants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=10054","title":{"rendered":"How To Avoid Search Warrants"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, DuckDuckGo tweeted that they have had zero search warrants since their founding in 2008<\/a>. That\u2019s because they don\u2019t log their users\u2019 searches so there\u2019s no useful information for law enforcement to demand access to. Contrast that to Google who last year had 11,554 geofence warrants<\/a>. To channel the meme, if you collect it, they will come. What DDG has shown is that if you don\u2019t<\/i> collect it, they will leave you and your users alone.<\/p>\n

I was disappointed with the tweet\u2019s comments. They mostly fell into the \u201cYeah but the XYZ search engine is better\u201d or the \u201cYeah but the guvment will issue secret warrants forcing them record queries and not reveal it\u201d categories.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure that the second complaint is reasonable in the U.S. There have been such warrants targeted at specific individuals but a general warrant targeting everyone would doubtless run into fourth amendment issues.<\/p>\n

As far as which search engine is best, that\u2019s a war I don\u2019t want to enlist in. Irreal commenters I trust have recommended Brave<\/a> and I do<\/i> use it but my go to search engine is still DDG and I find it adequate for most uses. Brave, I find, does have slightly more comprehensive results so I fall back to it if I need to bear down. Truth to tell, I suspect that the search engine with the best results\u2014once you filter out all the nonsense\u2014is Google but then your search data is being logged and you could be caught up\u2014perfectly innocently\u2014in some law enforcement dragnet having nothing to do with you.<\/p>\n

I think we should all take a moment and celebrate DDG\u2014and yes, the others\u2014for keeping our data so safe that law enforcement doesn\u2019t bother trying to get it out of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, DuckDuckGo tweeted that they have had zero search warrants since their founding in 2008. That\u2019s because they don\u2019t log their users\u2019 searches so there\u2019s no useful information for law enforcement to demand access to. Contrast that to Google … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[3],"class_list":["post-10054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10054"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10054\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10055,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10054\/revisions\/10055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}